


D for Defender

by Amand_r



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adventure, Comedy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-27
Updated: 2011-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:26:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a man stalking the Wizarding world.  Or a bat.  Maybe a Man-Bat.  Severus is probably having an affair, Harry's tired all the time, oh, and those drunks out in East Anglia are complaining about the green lights.  Again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	D for Defender

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the...2009? Snarry Games. Thanks to jadzialove for being the best beta evar, cleaning up parts 1-3. joanwilder, aka Alfred, hit all of it, especially part 4, with a batarang of spag (Thanks beth for a few quick saves!). All italicized bumper quotes from The Tick: The Animated Series.

**PART ONE: RUMOURS. THEY SAY HE'S A BAT.**

 _Destiny's powerful hand has made the bed of my future, and it's up to me to lie in it. I am destined to be a superhero. To right wrongs, and to pound two-fisted justice into the hearts of evildoers everywhere. And you don't fight destiny. No sir. And, you don't eat crackers in the bed of your future, or you get all... scratchy._

 

Harry was about four fingers into Severus's arse when it occurred to him that the reason Severus had been acting oddly of late was probably that he was having an affair. Listening to the man moan, Harry pulled his hand back minutely and laid a kiss on his balls before giving the matter some further consideration. Late nights, sleeping all day, welching on obligations, increased libido, willingness to try new things. Harry glanced down at his fingers as he worked his thumb against Severus's perineum and the man arched like a cat.

The thought had been enough to interrupt his rhythm, and he stopped in the middle of adding his thumb to Severus's hole. Severus raised his lower half up in the air, placing most of his weight on his shoulders, and then slid down the bed a little to goad Harry on, but nothing happened. Harry looked at his partner critically for a second: long, lithe, a little pale, not classically handsome, but still fit. He was entering his middle age, really, what with the longer life span, and so maybe, maybe all the odd things recently were a mid-life crisis.

"Merlin's balls, Harry," Severus groaned. "You're a fucking tease." Harry shook his head and tended to his own cock with his other hand as he twisted his wrist and folded his thumb in towards his palm. Yeah, he'd think about this later, after they'd both come all over the place. Sometimes a gift horse was really a gift horse.

He hadn't really harbored much excitement about this act in particular when Severus had suggested it, and then snarkily thrown a few dog-eared Wizarding sex manuals at him before shutting himself in his lab for a few weeks, but the more Harry had studied the moving pictures (moving pictures! Hello Wizard porn!), the more he'd been curious, and now he was downright ready to finish himself off all over Severus's chest. The man was sweating and writhing a little, and Harry could feel the muscles enveloping his fingers and thumb, his whole hand really, and when he closed his eyes it was is if that was his cock in there, and it was. Wow, he could imagine every twitch and ripple of movement. He closed his hand once he was in, like the manuals had said, and Severus screeched, his fingers scratching at the sheets.

Hopefully that was good.

Harry worked his hand, unclenched his fist, teased the prostate, trying to keep himself from coming, but Severus opened his eyes and looked at him, _looked_ right at him, and said, "You may come now, Harry," and that was enough to make him lose it.

Harry came on his own chest and Severus's legs, and then he reached forward with his sticky hand and worked Severus's cock and arse in rhythm, desperate to make the man's back bend, his hair stick to his neck, his face contort, eyes screwed shut. Those hands, so skilled at duelling or Potions, smacked the bed uselessly and his legs strained, taut lines in his thighs standing out, Harry thought to himself, just so that he could kiss them, lick them.

Severus came, screaming, and Harry waited until he was done, lying there, legs akimbo, before he pulled his hand free and staggered to the toilet to wash himself up.

When he returned, tossing a warm damp flannel at his husband, he fell face forward onto the bed and huffed into the pillow.

"You were right," he said grudgingly, though not that grudgingly. All the flashes and suspicions that had come to him in the middle of sex, they all faded in the afterglow. Of _course_ Severus wasn't having an affair. It was preposterous.

Severus shifted on the bed, and Harry heard the sound of cloth on skin. "I know. I'm always right."

But how preposterous? It wasn't that Severus was unattractive. It had been fifteen years since the end of the war, and still Harry often found letters addressed to him when he was going through his fan mail: usually some older woman or sixteen year old girl who couldn't believe that Severus was gay, only that he just hadn't met _them_ yet, and then what usually followed was a plea for a date or meeting of some sort. Harry's fan mail was much the same way, but with a wider range and more vehement arguments for his 'conversion' (i.e. Everyone seemed to think Severus had Imperiused him. Highly unlikely. He was Harry Potter). Better still were the offers of a three or foursome, or the occasional requests for naughty photos.

Severus thought the letters were terribly amusing. Years before they might have made him angry, but retirement from teaching and the end of the war had seen him lighten a little. He was by no means charming, humorous, or tolerant of, well, anyone, but he was loads better than Harry remembered him being at Hogwarts.

Well, that, and his arse looked good in Muggle trousers.

Harry flipped over then, so that he could watch Severus toss the rag over in the direction of the toilet.

Severus rolled over to him and pressed his body into Harry's, running his tongue behind his ear as his hands traveled up his sides and then onto his chest, pinching his nipples. "You look like you could use a drink, Mister Potter."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Gods, yes."

Severus reached over to his bedside table and retrieved two glasses of what proved to be water. Harry struggled to sit up, which was difficult because Severus was practically holding him down. He downed the water and barely got the glass on his nightstand before his head hit the pillow again and he yawned.

"Go to sleep," Severus whispered in his ear as he closed his eyes. Harry felt the dip of the mattress when Severus moved away from him, getting up from the bed. He never heard him leave the room.

 

  


* * *

 

Harry stood at the foot of the bed and watched Severus's leg dangle over the edge. Soft snores emanated from the head of the bed somewhere. There were a lot of pillows, and a great deal of them were piled on Severus's head. Harry contemplated the mountain of them as they shifted when Severus shifted; there had to be at least a half-dozen of them. How had that even happened? This had left the realm of comfortable and into the area of shameless hedonism.

He scrubbed his face with his hand and realized that he didn't really care about the pillows. What he needed was a massively strong cup of tea, and possibly to stop waking in the mornings feeling like utter shite.

"Hey," he said, sitting lightly on the edge of the bed and slapping Severus's calf. "Hey, are you planning on getting up today?"

In response, Severus's hand raised itself from its dangle over the edge of the bed, twirled once at the wrist, gave him a half-hearted V, and then fell back down to hang listlessly.

Harry sighed. "Okay then. Good to know."

The kitchen was spotless in that strange way kitchens had when they hadn't been used in a long time, and Harry thought about searching the icebox for something worth drinking or eating before realising that he needed to be in to work fifteen minutes ago. Years ago he would have been out of the house and jogging to work instead of Apparating, but lately he just hadn't felt like it; most days he barely heard the alarm.

He wondered if he wasn't coming down with something, but there wasn't time to think about that, because Ginny would be at the house, banging on the doors if he didn't leave soon, so Harry tossed on a jacket, inventoried his pockets, holstered his wand and stomped his way out of the house without worrying about waking Severus. Would serve him right for sleeping in, the lazy arse.

Harry Apparated to the back alley that he used to get into the Ministry, and then stood there for a few seconds, nodding to people who passed him, all waving cheery hellos. He was knackered. If he hadn't seen the clock, he would never have guessed that he'd got a full eight hours of sleep.

There was nothing for it, though. Harry steeled himself for a full day of work, yawned once, waved to the guard, and stepped into the lobby.

He passed the newsstand, though his eyes caught the headlines of the _Daily Prophet_ (Ministry Supply Houses Vandalised), the Quibbler (Who is the Man Behind the Bat?!!?), Witch Weekly (We Give That Mystery Man Three Brooms Up! Rowr!) and Quidditch News (How to Mod your Broom Like the Best of the Best!). If there were anything interesting or relevant to him, he'd hear about it in the office. Romilda was a great assistant like that. He was late, but a cursory glance at the schedule on his wristwatch, the one Romilda had charmed in the manner of a wearable Wizarding PDA, revealed that he was actually free for about twenty minutes, and then of course, Ginny would be banging on his door, and he wasn't even there. He considered being late just to take the piss out of her.

Harry joined the queue of the Ministry's lobby café and stared at the menu blearily. Did he want tea? One of those fancy coffees that Hermione chugged like water? Something that ended in 'ino'? Too many choices. He was developing a decision making disorder just looking at the board above the 'bearista's' head (bless the Wizarding World and their malapropistic ways.)

"Hem hem," said a noise behind him, and he turned to find Dolores I-was-Imperioused-No Really-I-Swear Umbridge staring at him through her glasses, face set in a permanent scowl. "The queue is moving, _Mister_ Potter."

She still refused to call him an Auror. Harry smiled and shrugged, shuffling forward in the queue. He could hear her muttering to herself as they wended their way through the rat maze in front of the shoppe.

Harry turned suddenly. "So, how is the steno pool these days, Dolores?"

Umbridge narrowed her eyes. He knew for a fact that Dolores was languishing away in the steno pool, where she would probably stay forever, because she generally tried to take over the job of whomever she was supposed to be typing and taking dictation for. As far as he was concerned, she had got a huge break, because if he'd had his way, she'd have been languishing away in Azkaban and not in the basements of the Ministry where she could wait, gestating some plan to return to power.

The 'bearista' smiled when he shuffled forward. "Auror Potter! Good morning! What can I make for you?"

Harry waved a hand. "Whatever you like. Something with caffeine. Frappy-crappy-rappy whatever you give Solicitor Granger."

The woman behind the counter smiled brightly, then looked over her shoulder at the coffee station. "Triple non-fat espresso soy sweet-cane with a shot of Bertie's!"

Harry shook his head and dug about in his pockets for change. No wonder Hermione was awake twenty-four hours a day.

 

  


* * *

 

Romilda greeted him at his desk when he dragged himself in, her face bright and smiling. She'd obviously been practising the Granger method of caffeine application. Or maybe everyone looked so energetic because he wasn't. Romilda was a great assistant, and she didn't mind being shared between six of them; he was insanely happy that he had been able to have her hired. In fact, if she hadn't been, Harry figured he'd still be filling out the exact same expense report that he'd had on his desk when she'd come in three years ago, asking for a job.

Ginny was already there, sitting at her desk across from his. They'd once been across the room, but soon after they had been paired together, they'd shoved their desks to face each other. To this day, Harry wasn't sure that that had been such a great idea; Ginny, unlike her brother, was a bit more liberal with the tossing of office supplies.

He set the coffee down on the desk and unloaded his outside cloak on the wall hook. He dropped into his chair and put his head in his hands.

"You're late," Ginny said. A paperclip landed on his blotter.

"I'm exhausted," he answered. "Just looking at you makes my body tired."

Ginny made a noise of derision. "It's all that kinky sex you're having," and for a second Harry thought she knew something she shouldn't until he heard her bark a laugh. "You're getting old, Snitch."

Harry looked up and smiled at her, resting his chin on his hands. The office was fairly busy already, though that wasn't surprising since he had been the last one to arrive. He'd seen Colin Creevy on his way to the loo while walking in, and 'Milda was flitting about the office, delivering post. Susan Bones sat at her desk and scowled at a paper in her hands, and their two other officemates were probably out of the office. Harry rarely saw them since they had taken the night shift.

"I suppose that we have to get to work sooner or later," he said feebly. "What are we doing today?"

Ginny grinned and tossed a stack of newspapers on his desk, and the resounding thud of them sloshed the coffee though the drink spout. "I want to talk about the Man-Bat." She smiled and waited for it to sink in.

Harry stared at her for a second, because he thought she'd said 'Man-Bat'. When Ginny's expression didn't change, but her eyes drifted down to the stack of papers in front of him, he realised that she was completely serious. He glanced down at the cover of The _Prophet_ , whose caption he had ignored earlier, but the moving photo was about as clear as those Muggle photographs of Bigfoot out in the woods. Over and over, the photo showed the shadow jumping from one of the Ministry's storehouses in Ottery St. Catchpole. The headline all but screamed in outrage that the warehouse had been looted, and then set on fire.

Harry slid the papers away from him. "I don't want to talk about the Man-Bat," he said snippily. He didn't like the idea of there being something, no no, some _one_ , out there that made people think he or she wasn't even human. It fostered fear, and awe. And sometimes imitation.

Harry wasn't taking the Man-Bat seriously, but apparently he was going to have to, if the person had finally upgraded from stopping the occasional crime in Wizarding communities to vandalising private property. Private Ministry property.

"Do we have to take this assignment?" he asked blearily. "And also, please don't call it 'Man-Bat'. It's ludicrous."

Ginny crossed her arms and leaned on her desk. "Batman, then."

Harry shook his head and skimmed the article. There was no mention of what had been in the warehouse, only that it had been Ministry property. This was the second Ministry warehouse this week. Minister of Magic Shacklebolt had no comment, but a 'source' said that the warehouses were filled with old equipment that had been slated for demolition. Harry rolled his eyes. What old equipment? Fax machines? Snowcone makers?

Not that he knew or cared what was in the warehouses. Or rather, he would have to soon, and he would be able to get that sort of information from a more reliable source: the actual inner channels of the Ministry itself.

Harry tutted at Ginny. "We call him that, someone'll get sued."

Ginny raised her arms out on either side and contorted her face. "I am the night," she growled.

Harry snorted and folded the paper. "Yes, well. We'll cover the Man…Bat…Thing," he agreed, choosing to ignore Ginny and her sugar rush. "We should send a memo down to Storage to find out what was in those warehouses. And then we should actually go look at the second one, though I don't think it'll do any good."

Ginny rolled her eyes. "The first one was a burned out husk." She leaned in even further. "What happened to all the old equipment 'slated for demolition'?" She looked about, and Harry leaned in to her. They looked like they were going to kiss, and maybe fifteen years ago, they might have. Everyone knew better now. Ginny's face was inches from his, her ponytail flipping into her face. "I think the Man-Bat is on to something," she whispered.

Harry smiled. "Like an avenging angel."

Ginny grinned. "Yeah. Like a certain war hero—"

"I'm not the Man-Bat," Harry said suddenly. He saw where this was going. He shoved back and glared at her, wishing that Ginny would stop with this line of questioning. He wasn't some masked vigilante. He doled out plenty of justice and drew a paycheque at the same time; he certainly didn't need to do it in the off hours.

He could tell by the nature of her smile that she was more amused than seriously kicking the idea about. "You are _awfully_ tired these days, Snitch."

Harry gave her the finger. "Believe me, if I had more energy, I'd be using it elsewhere." For a second, he thought about telling her about Severus and the affair that he might or might not have been having. It was too soon to mention. So far he'd been at work for about ten minutes, and already he and Ginny were gossiping about a mass conspiracy, a Batman, and adding Severus's secret imaginary lover to the mix would turn it into a soap opera.

Ginny smirked. "Okay then, 'Milda sends the forms down to Storage, and we move on." She set the papers aside and picked up another file folder. "Those irritating people have written again," she said, waving what looked like the remains of a Howler. "'Milda opened it with tongs, and yet, it incinerated our stack of take-away menus."

'Milda, when he sneaked a glance at her, looked a little…singed. She gave him big eyes and slammed a few files about her desk.

"They keep complaining about the lights," Ginny said grumpily, putting her feet up on the edge of her desk. "You know, if I didn't know better, I'd say that they're all drinking something out there."

Harry sipped his coffee and made a face. Too sweet; Hermione must have been making up for all those years when her dentist parents wouldn't let her have sugar. He pushed it towards Ginny and sat back. "Well, what did Creevy say?" He'd handed the assignment to Creevy because he had no interest in going out to listen to the complaints of a bunch of barmy old wizards in East Anglia.

Ginny picked up the coffee and sniffed it. "He said he was all over the place back there, and there's nothing. There are no lights." She sipped the coffee. "This is horrendously sweet."

Harry shrugged. "Didn't Fred and George used to have a warehouse out there? A testing site? Something?"

Ginny set the coffee on Creevy's desk behind her. "I think so. That was the one they burned down. Or blew up. Or caused to be structurally unsound." She grinned and tilted her chair back on two legs. "They have so many ways of destroying things."

It was true too. Harry knew for a fact that the Ministry had paid them _not_ to make things for the public, and instead placed orders for various tricks and tools that had become Ministry proprietary.

He watched Creevy return from the loo, regard the coffee on his desk delightedly, and make a wistful face at Ginny. Harry wondered if Ginny was even aware that Colin was sweet on her. Then Colin sipped from the coffee, made a face, and set it gingerly on the edge of his partner's desk. Susan raised her brows at Colin and tossed the whole thing in the rubbish. That was right, pregnant Susan was off caffeine.

Harry sighed. He wanted a pick-me-up. His PDA read that he was blanked for an hour. "Hey," he said to Ginny, who spilled herself out of her chair and bounced on the balls of her feet. "Let's go ask your brothers about the area. You know," he said gravely, "for research."

Ginny clapped her hands once, beaming. "Oh! Outdoors research! Very very important indeed. Can we stop for kebabs?"

 

  


* * *

 

Ginny picked her teeth with her kebab stick. "So, Snitch, are we actually going to ask questions, or are you going to spend twenty minutes playing with George and Fred in the backroom again?"

Harry shrugged and tossed his kebab stick in a bin as he passed it. They were at the far end of Diagon Alley, back where the twins had relocated—a huge building they had torn down and then rebuilt right in the same spot. Harry wondered what they could have possibly needed with a new building, but remembering their testing warehouses and the spectacular ways some of them had incinerated, he figured that their onsite testing facilities were probably made of Permacrete. Or Titanium. Or Permacrete with titanium flecks in it.

Harry shrugged. "It's not my fault," he said as they tripped through the open door. A bell dinged and they glanced about for the source. Magical bells. "They make me."

Ginny rolled her eyes, but she was all smiles for Angelina, who emerged from the backroom and gathered them in an awkward hug. Harry let himself be crushed to her very pregnant belly and grinned at Ginny over Angelina's shoulder. Ginny leaned against the counter and poked at a cage full of Pygmy Puffs. They squealed and one of them licked her finger. Harry wondered if she'd got one for James yet, or if he wasn't the kind of child who wanted a Pygmy Puff or fluffy pet. He made a note to ask her; he should probably be keeping track of things like that anyway.

"You here officially, then?" Angelina said, eyes flitting to the clock and the wands in their holsters. She sat on a high stool behind the counter and leaned back against a standing shelf perilously. "They'll be wanting to unload all sorts of things on you, you know."

Harry raised his hands. "Officially, but we're not peddling any more of their special wares to the Ministry. They can get another shill or go through proper channels." He leaned on the counter next to Ginny and rested his head in his hands. He really wanted to take a nap. Just a small kip. Maybe he could accidentally dose himself with one of the twin's trick sleeping powders.

There was a loud bang from the back room, and then Angelina sighed. "It's the Whistle Jimmies," she muttered. "They're going to both end up at St. Mungo's and then I'll go into labour. OI YOU!" she shouted towards the back room. The green curtain shuddered, and then a plume of pinkish gray smoke billowed from the gap. "The authorities are here to cart you away!"

Ginny snorted and messed about with her ponytail, but Harry just laid his head on the counter. "I don't have the energy to arrest them. If they're back there cooking children parts or something, Gin, just take care of it."

Ginny raised her hands. "Can't. Family get a free pass, you know that."

"Oooh, speaking of nepotism," Angelina murmured, sitting forward in her stool as much as her massive belly would allow. "Have you seen Draco Malfoy?" Her eyes lit up and she waved her hands before settling them on the top of her stomach and flipping her hair out of her face. "They say he went raving mad and his wife found him walking about the grounds of the Manse, starkers and muttering to himself. Been in St. Mungo's for a week."

Ginny sighed. "Poor Draco, I had such high hopes for him after his dad and mum were shipped off to Azkaban." Harry closed his eyes and thought about Draco Malfoy.

The war hadn't, for all that last minute allegiances had been changed, managed to do Draco Malfoy any favours in the temperament department. And leniency for Harry Potter in his hour of need had certainly softened the sentencing blow for both of his parents, but Narcissa Malfoy had died in her third year of imprisonment, and Lucius Malfoy had managed a daring escape, probably fueled by his utter lack of feelings, making him undetectable to the Dementors. There weren't even really that many Dementors there anymore, anyway. Not many of them had been interested in returning to Azkaban after the war, and Harry had breathed a sigh of relief. Occasionally, the Aurors had to go out and deal with a rogue one on the edges of a town somewhere in the North, but wherever they had gone, it was a mystery Harry was in no hurry to solve.

"Well," he said, "I'm sure Severus has something to share. If I get any information, I'll pass it along." And in the meantime, "Are they really back there?"

"WHEN ARE WE NOT?" George shouted, and then popped his head out from behind the green curtain, like the great and powerful Weasley. "Come on then, arrest me. I have been bad." His face sobered mockingly. "I solemnly swear I'm up to no bloody good." Then he grinned and one crooked finger snaked out from behind the curtain. "Come into the lair."

Harry shuffled towards the curtain. Ginny and Angelina were still hashing out the gossip about Draco Malfoy, but he knew Ginny was leaving him to the rest of their visit with the twins. Besides, sometimes she had hunches, and apparently her hunch was taking her to Draco Malfoy; he'd learnt over the years not to question her. Sometimes her niffler ways of gathering information came from strange places and ended up being quite useful.

"What are you doing?" he asked, peeking about the curtain.

George waved him in, and Fred looked up at him owlishly through goggles that magnified his eyes three times over. Harry was flooded with unpleasant visual memories of Sybill Trelawney. "It's classified. You aren't our _shill_ anymore, right?"

Ha ha, so yes, they'd heard everything. "I don't have time to sit in the patent office. Once I figured out that you were using us all as couriers, I decided that you can do your own filing."

George grinned. "Rats. Well, this is still classified. This one—" he jerked his thumb at Fred, "thinks that we keep jinxing new inventions by talking about them before we're done." He turned an index finger around his ear.

Fred threw down the tool in his hand. "This is shite. We need a Muggle soldering gun, like Dad's." He looked up at Harry. "Do you know how to use a soldering gun?"

Harry shook his head. "Nope." He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from touching anything. Fred and George's workshop and back storeroom was like a wonderland of mischief. Sticky fingers tended to get in trouble. He leaned in to inspect some jars filled with fluorescent green moving goo and wrinkled his nose at the smell that emanated from them. "That warehouse-hangar thing out in East Anglia. The one you tested in for a while? Remember that place?"

Fred lifted his goggles and rolled his eyes. "Oh, do I remember that. It was a shite place. One of our first—"

"They _hated_ us out there, they did—"

"Claimed that we did all sorts of things that we didn't—"

George tapped the cylinder experimentally and frowned when nothing happened. Harry desperately wanted to know what was supposed to happen, but he figured that he could wait. Plus, he didn't want to derail the conversation. "So," George said. "We dug about, you now, get to know the neighbours out there, make sure that the other lessees weren't doing anything we might get blamed for—"

Fred turned the handle on the cylinder and smiled when a puff of pink steam exploded from it. "That's about right," he said to George, and then looked back up at Harry. "Turns out, the whole lot's owned by the Ministry. Three old hangars from the last war in the forties, a water mill, and a bunch of old barn structures that haven't had animals in them for ages." He frowned. "I dunno what they wanted them for. Never saw a soul the whole time we were out there, but heard things."

The cylinder began to whistle, and everyone stepped back. "Is it…is it supposed to do that?" Harry asked.

Fred picked up the cylinder with one gloved hand. "Uh, no." George ran behind him and opened a large metal door in the concrete wall and Fred gingerly set it inside the compartment. George slammed the door just in time for them to hear a huge boom. Harry blinked.

"Did that—"

Fred sighed. "It will work someday." He dusted his hands. "So, the hangar. Yeah, right. Here's the thing. We didn't burn it down. It just sort of…exploded one day when we weren't there." He shrugged. "Could have been our fault. Mister Plastique here was going through a second honeymoon with Muggle incendiary devices."

"Oi!" George said, washing his hands at the sink in the back corner of the room; Harry noticed that they'd installed a drenching shower next to it. What _were_ they doing back here? "Did I say anything when you had that obsession with Muggle condoms?"

Fred tilted his head. "No," he murmured dreamily.

It was time to stop all the mental trains and bring them into the station where Harry was. He shuddered and cleared his throat. "But the strange things, that happened? Did you ever see a green light? They're complaining about seeing green lights out there."

"Could be fairies," Fred offered, wiping his hands on a towel. "Or they could all be drinking heavily in secret. I vote on the latter."

Harry grinned. "That's what Ginny said."

"Country Wizards," George said, rolling his eyes. "You think _we're_ stuck in the dark ages." He turned off the faucet and put his hands on his hips. "So, while you're not shilling for us anymore," and here he winked, "I bet Ginny's out there gossiping about Malfoy and the nutter brigade. So," he said, rubbing his hands together, "want to see the new stuff? It's all _shiny_."

Harry's hands twitched in his pockets. "Oh yeah."

Thirty minutes later, Harry's pockets were stuffed with things that he didn't even really know what to do with ("Try them at home," George had said. "Outside, though," Fred had added in distracted afterthought."), and Ginny had managed to cover her forearms with sleeping Pygmy Puffs. Angelina was devouring a meat pie and laughing at something Ginny had pointed out in the open issue of Witch Weekly on the counter.

Harry sauntered up to them and nudged Ginny's arm. "It's amazing that we still get paid for all the work we don't do," he told her earnestly.

The magazine slid in front of him with a push of Angelina's hand. "Witch Weekly thinks you're Man-Bat," she said jovially.

Harry glanced down at the article, festooned with pink scrolling text and a breakdown of his movements in the past five years, a small interview he'd given them ten years ago in which he'd made the mistake of answering their insipid questions about his favorite food and sign of the zodiac, and a few pictures of him juxtaposed with another rather shoddy picture of the supposed Man-Bat.

It was a person, he could tell that much. Instead, he flipped the magazine closed. "Okay, that's a great use of company time, then," he added and shook his head as Ginny pulled a Pygmy Puff from her robes and plopped it in the pen. "We're out of here."

"Oi!" Fred said, his head popping out from the back curtain of the shop. "Tell that husband of yours that if he wants another contract from us, he'll deliver the order of Scream In A Bottle that we paid for already. He promised it a week ago."

Harry shrugged nonchalantly, but it was just an act. Severus was usually scrupulous about filling his brewing orders on time, and he never forgot any of them. "Oh you know him. He probably hated the tint and threw the whole batch out even though it was perfectly fine."

Angelina rolled her eyes and leant against the counter as far as her pregnant belly would go. Harry vaguely wondered if it was Fred's or George's. He wondered if even they knew. Or if they cared. Probably not.

As they strolled out of the shop, Harry felt distinctly irritated. As if he wanted to go home in the middle of the day and catch Severus doing something illicit with the milkman. Instead, he turned to Ginny. "Severus is having an affair."

Ginny shoved her hands into her pockets and whistled. "You're daft." They passed a few market stalls and she smiled at the man selling pasties. Harry nudged her away with a sharp tilt of his head. "What? I like him. I'm a single mum. I have to meet men somehow."

Harry shook his head. "The meat pie man?"

Ginny turned and waved at the man, still walking backwards. "Why not? His name is Bertram, and his backside is gorgeous." Without looking at him, she changed the subject. "He's not having an affair."

Harry turned backwards to look at Bertram the meat pie man again. He was kind of adorable, once one got past the fact that he sold meat pies. And well, who didn't love a good meat pie? Except for vegetarians? And people who wanted to avoid hepatitis? "You're right," he said to her, and they turned around before they could crash into someone laden with packages. "He does have a gorgeous backside."

 

  


* * *

 

Severus straddled Harry and worked on the muscles in his shoulders. "There has to be some mediwizard you can see for this," he griped.

Harry smiled into the pillow. "You want some other man to give me a sensual massage?"

The hands paused, and Severus shifted on his back so that he was settled more firmly on the swell of Harry's arse. Harry could smell the oil that Severus was using: something with valerian and mint; the mint was trying very hard to mask the other ingredient, but it was nearly impossible to cover up valerian root.

"I didn't realise that we'd gotten to that part yet," Severus said softly. The hands ran down Harry's back and thumbs pressed into his spine. "Shall we skip foreplay? I suppose I could be inconvenienced for this evening."

Harry grinned. Severus hated foreplay. "Oh, I think this qualifies. As sex, too."

Severus tugged on an earlobe disapprovingly. "If you fall asleep, I'll have to put your hands in warm water." It was a completely idle threat for obvious reasons. Harry smashed his face into the pillow and wondered if now was a good time to ask _the question_.

Apparently, it was. "If you were interested in leaving our relationship," Harry mumbled into the pillow, "you'd say something, right? No subterfuge?" The hands on his shoulders didn't even pause; they rubbed with the fingertips, locating a knot on Harry's left shoulder and running in circles.

"You are an idiot," Severus said again, and the tint in his voice was reassuring. Well, as reassuring as he could be when he honestly thought someone was being an idiot. Which was often, actually. Severus still, after fifteen years, referred to Dudley as 'The Walking Mistake'.

Harry waved a hand at the wrist, rather like he'd seen Severus do that morning. He was also considering the pile of pillows that supported him. Now he remembered why they had them. Merlin's balls, he _was_ a hedonist. "I just want you to know that if you wanted to leave—"

Severus thumped his fists on Harry's back in rapid succession, and the rest of the words wouldn't come out. He did manage to hear a repeated, "Idiot."

Well, that was that, then.

"Fred says you owe them an order of Scream," he said into the pillow, glad to change the subject.

Severus snorted behind him. "Messieurs Weasley and Weasley will just have to wait." There was a pause. "Or shall I call them Messieurs Johnson and Johnson?" Severus reached over to Harry's nightstand and opened a drawer. Harry restrained a snort of glee. This was going to be good; he loved this game.

Harry lifted his head from the pillow in time to catch the wicked gleam in Severus's eye as he popped open the restraining cuffs. "I think they might like that," he answered.

He was rewarded with an eyeroll, and then those long fingers traversed up his biceps, up his forearms and threaded into his own. "And what would you like?"

Harry smiled. "Oh my list is so very long."

 

  


* * *

 

Out in the middle of a field, behind a series of decrepit buildings, there was a bang, and the windows of the warehouse flashed with green.

 

 

 **PART TWO: NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG.**

 _You know, evil comes in many forms, be it a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin. But you can't let the package hide the pudding. Evil is just plain bad. You don't cotton to it. You gotta smack it on the nose with the rolled up newspaper of goodness. Bad dog! Bad dog!_

 

Harry sighed and kicked a few rocks as he walked through the field with Amos Frobisher. The man was in full 'I am not a wizard' wizard gear: dress, shiny mac, mismatched wellies, and a hat that screamed, 'Yes, I Muggle cosplay! Ask me how!' Sometimes, Harry wondered if the Ministry oughtn't to put out a pamphlet about how to dress in the Muggle world, and then he thought that if they did, then all the secondhand women's clothing shops in Britain might go out of business.

"So you say that the lights come from over there," Harry said as they tromped across the field and towards the abandoned water mill. It looked run down and ramshackle, as if no one had been in it for ages. Maybe some magical creature had somehow set up shop in it, and he would have to clear them out.

"And the screams," Frobisher said, crinkling his eyes at Harry. "Didn't you read the letters? Sent fifteen of them this month, we have."

Harry frowned and shrugged. "I'm sorry, I only read the last five, then. I don't know where the others went. Where did you send them?" He didn't really care, but it might have been relevant, and Harry had learnt that keeping people talking was one of the best ways to discover things unintentionally. Like if the man was distilling illegal firewhisky out here. If he was, Harry wanted to buy some.

Frobisher waved his hands, almost like a pinwheel. "Sent them to everyone. The Minister, the Undersecretary, your office. Found out last week that you lot own those buildings." 'You Lot' must have meant the Ministry. It was Harry's only card in placating Frobisher, actually, and he was going to play it.

"I just found that out myself," he told him, glaring at the mill and the barn structures beyond it. He really didn't want to have to investigate himself, but when he'd sent Colin out here by himself, he'd found nothing. And the lights were still bothering Frobisher and his family, and with the added bonus of screaming, well, Harry just didn’t want to do it himself.

Ginny had sent him a brief note that said: _Snitch—YOUR SON hexed his fingers together, and I'll be at St. Mungo's for the morning. Have fun in East Anglia! B._

Funny how James was always his son when he did something stupid.

So here he was, entertaining Amos Frobisher, ploughing through a muddy field, with a cup of piss-poor Starbucks in his hand and wishing that he could just inject the caffeine right into his bloodstream with a needle. He thought about asking Severus to make him something for the fatigue, and then he thought about what could be causing it. Harry dropped that line of thinking, because they were all medical things that he didn't want to consider.

He looked at Frobisher and wondered if the man really had been drinking. The thing was, he didn't _smell_ drunk, and he was eccentric, not crazy. Harry didn't like the idea of green lights as a matter of course; they were associated with too many things that never amounted to good, especially in the Wizarding world.

"Well, I don't know how you do things in London, Auror Potter, but here, we have manners. You respond to a letter you've received."

Harry sipped from his coffee and wondered how Starbucks could completely botch something so easy to make. It was as if they burnt the beans on purpose, because they had known that he was coming. "I assure you," he said absentmindedly, "that Auror Creevey paid close attention when he was out here. He simply didn't get a chance to witness what you describe. I promise that I'll go over and have a look in those buildings, and I apologise that I haven't gotten out here sooner. But I'm here now." He dumped the coffee out onto the grass and watched interestedly to see if it would kill it. He stowed the empty cup in his bag and wondered if 'Milda would yell at him for getting coffee on the State Secrets folders again. Oh well.

Frobisher grumbled under his breath. "Too busy with the bloody Man-Bat, you are," he said, and when Harry rolled his eyes, he added, "I hope Man-Bat comes out here and burns the whole lot down. Nothing but trouble for the past five months, with the lights and the screaming." When Harry glanced at him, Frobisher stabbed him in the chest with his finger. "I know you, Harry Potter. You have friends in high places, so you take care of this."

And with that, the man spun on his heel and stalked off in the direction from which they had come. Harry shook his head and watched him go, his women's coat flapping in the breeze of his gait. Wizards.

"Batman," he muttered, and then set off for the mill.

He was about twenty feet from the structure when someone stepped out of it, closing the door behind him as normal as you please, as if he came and went all the time. No matter that the thing looked about to fall down. Harry wondered if he was squatting in there. That might explain a great deal of things. Well, not actually, it didn't explain anything at all.

Harry waved his hand and shrugged his messenger bag. He had incendiaries in there and he didn't want to lose or jostle them. He raised one hand. "Hullo there! Nice day!"

The man said nothing. Harry tried to remember as much about him as possible: five nine, rail thin, maybe 170 pounds. Black hair, very short. Squinty eyes-- though it was sunny out and the Wizarding world seemed to have an unhealthy aversion to sunglasses. Harry pushed his further up his nose.

"Not allowed here," the man said, his voice gruff. The kind of gruff that raised Harry's hackles. He knew that tone. It was Department of Mysteries. He had often wondered if they taught that no-nonsense voice and attitude in some sort of orientation class upon joining the department. He wished he could get hold of that training himself; it might help him deal with his personal life. On second thought, Severus never responded well to threats. That was his version of foreplay.

"I'm Harry Potter," he said, shouldering his bag again and shoving his hands in his pockets. "I'm here from the Auror's office, just checking out some complaints." He looked over the man's shoulder at the building, with its partially boarded windows and curious green glass glinting in the sun. That would explain Frobisher's green lights. "They keep seeing lights over here at night, said something about screaming. I'm just here to make sure everything is okay."

He started forward but was stopped when the man stepped in front of him, into his personal space. Harry didn't blink. This man wasn't even remotely scary; Harry knew scary—he'd faced down Voldemort, died, come back to life. Hell, he'd been there when Ginny had gone into labour. "Really," he said, trying to be harmless but imposing, "I'll just have a look about, and then be on my way."

"Hold on hold on," the man said, raising his wand. "I said, no admittance."

Harry crossed his arms and tried to look intimidating. It was hard, he suspected, when he was wearing wellies under his robes. Wellies, that he had only just noticed, were not his usual black ones, but a blue pinstripe. Colin's nerd wellies. He hadn't even been paying attention when he'd tugged them on at the office.

"I don't know if I can just leave, unless I see some identification, Mister…?"

The man lowered his wand and shrugged, pulling a small card from his robes and handing it to Harry, who took it in two fingers and read the scrolling script:

Roger Ketterer  
Department of Mysteries  
 _Send all inquiries care of Level Nine_

Mister Ketterer glanced behind him at the building, and if Harry didn't know better, he would have said the man was nervous. Maybe Harry _didn't_ know better.

Harry tucked the card in his pocket and brushed his wand in its holster. It wasn't worth a showdown, really, and he could just go back to work and throttle some heads until he found out what he wanted to know, or—

"Look, I gather this is some sort of classified thing," he said, glancing about, trying to make it seem as if he was being conciliatory. "I get it. I really do. But those people over there—" He thumbed over his shoulder. "Think that you're doing some sort of secret government experiments that are likely to kill us all."

Roger smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Nonsense. Country wizards." He shrugged as if to say, 'What can you do?' The hairs on the back of Harry's neck itched suddenly with the weight of that smile, and he thought of Ginny. His eyes slid back to the mill, the green lights in the windows, and the three hangars beyond that. A lone tree in the middle of the grouping of buildings bent a little in the breeze. Its leaves were all dead. It was May.

Harry gestured to the tree. "It's dead. You all should do something about that."

"What?" Roger looked behind him for a second, eyes wide with worry, but when they settled on the tree, he visibly calmed. Harry was starting to think that Roger's Unspeakable training had only covered the first two bases: _intimidate_ and _shun_ , and had neglected the last one, _poker face_.

"Your tree," Harry said. "Could come down one day, damage the building." He smiled innocently. "The fragile, wooden building." Oh no, not threatening at all.

Roger shrugged. "We'll deal with it. Call on the neighbors." He returned Harry's smile wanly. "Send them a fruit basket."

Harry didn't think he'd ever want to get a fruit basket from the Department of Mysteries. Or Fred and George. Or Ginny. Actually, he didn't much care for fruit baskets. Too many apples. But he couldn't do anything standing here like an arse. On the other hand, his curiosity was officially piqued. This was loads better and more interesting than Man-Bat-Thing. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and took a few shuffling steps backwards.

"Well then, I'll leave you to it, Mister Ketterer. I mean, it's not as if you're storing bodies in there, are you?" Harry chuckled at the sentence, like he knew he was supposed to, but he watched Ketterer's eye twitch.

The Department of Mysteries needed better employees.

Harry spun on the spot and Apparated back to the Ministry, a whole new set of questions in his head.

 

  


* * *

 

There was a note waiting for him when he got back, and 'Milda waved from across the room, her mouth full of what looked like wiring cables. Harry wondered how she was actually able to do half of the 'Muggle tech improvements' that she did, and if any of them had been approved by the head office. Then he realised that he didn't care. He flipped open the note with one hand and pulled off his wellies with the other as he sat down, tossing the boots in the general direction of the bin in which they were supposed to live.

 **Come by at noon. Bring a curry.**

 **Ron**

 **ps: and samosas. Not the shite ones.  
**

Harry smiled. Ron's love of Muggle take-away was endearing, and also a bit of a pain in the arse. He would have to make a side trip to Muggle London, though that was really just an inconvenience. Harry was used to being inconvenienced by Ron, in the good way. Ron's "inconveniences" these days usually involved Muggle take-away and treacle tart.

He was at the house at noon sharp, and he didn't even bother ringing, just opened the backdoor and walked into the kitchen in time to see Rose dash past him, pink hair flying behind her, topless, wearing a pair of flip flops and a sparkly filmy skirt. Ron came close behind her, grabbing for her halfheartedly, and when she turned the corner and ran screaming mimi into the front of the house, he straightened, waved his hands dismissively and turned to Harry. His hair stood on end and his t-shirt read, 'Does this face look sane to you?'

"Hey," Ron exclaimed. "Is it noon already? It feels like I just got up. Is my hair wonky?" He reached up to ruffle his hair and then shrugged.

Harry set the bags down on the counter and leaned against it. Hugo darted out from behind a chair, smiled at Harry, and bolted off in the direction his sister had gone. "How did you ever convince Hermione that you were the one suited for this?" he asked.

Ron pulled two glasses from the cupboard. "I lost the coin toss." Over his shoulder he called, "Rosita! Rose! Lunch!"

Rose ran back into the room, skidded to a stop in front of them, accepted the half of a sandwich that Ron had produced from nowhere, mumbled something like, "ThankyouSOmuch," and ran out again. Two seconds after she left, Hugo rounded the corner, said, "ThankyouSOmuch" for no reason, and dashed off after his sister.

"Your daughter's hair is pink," Harry mused.

Ron looked at him distractedly while he dug about in the cupboards. "What? Oh yeah. She asked me to this morning." He shrugged. "What can I say? It was raining." Harry was sure that explained something, but he wasn't sure what. Instead of bothering to decipher the conversation any further, Harry accepted the plates from Ron and set them up at the kitchen table. From the lounge area he heard squealing and the telly playing something. Ron rolled his eyes.

"When I was little, we thought a telly was some sort of talking doll," he mumbled. "Not that I don't like Muggle tech, Harry, but still…" He shook his head and plunked down in a chair next to Harry, then called over his shoulder, "ONLY ONE EPISODE!" Harry smirked; apparently Ron was taking notes from the Molly Weasley school of parenting.

They opened the cartons and dug in, eating in silence for a few minutes before Ron summoned a pitcher of pumpkin juice, tossing his wand down on a stack of legal briefs on the table. Harry wondered if they ever actually ate from the table. It certainly wasn't cleared well enough to sit four. Molly must have had a fit every time she came round.

"So, tell me everything," Ron demanded, waving a fork and nearly stabbing Harry in the cheek. "Is my sister still making a mockery of our profession?"

Harry smiled and pulled the lid from his tikka mala. "Not quite. She's really good, you know. You complain too much. I might keep her if you decide to do this forever."

Ron flicked aloo palak at him. "Bite your tongue. This is fun and all, but she's just a place holder until I come back."

They heard giggling from the other room, and Ron glanced in its direction but didn't seem concerned. Harry tucked a serviette in his neck; the last thing he needed was to get sauce on his robes.

He'd always hoped that Ron would decide to come back after his leave of absence, but it was hard to see why he would on some days. Sometimes Harry wanted nothing more than to curl up on the settee and sleep. He suspected that this rarely happened with small children, but the siren call of home and sleep seemed to override practicality at this point.

"Well," he said, "I'm sure that she'll hang about while you get back into shape for work," he ribbed.

"Are you serious?" Ron asked, wiping his forehead. "I run five miles a day in the morning before 'Mione leaves for work." He shoveled the goat cheese into his mouth and spoke before he was done chewing. "I have to stay in shape. When Hugo's ready for Primary, I'm back to the grind."

Harry stabbed at his chicken. "I dunno. I guess I envy anyone who can stay home. Right now. I'm tired. It'd be nice to laze about—"

"Oi!" Ron grinned. "What, do you think I sit about all day and eat Chocolate Cauldrons? Listen to my stories on the radio?" He looked thoughtful. "Well, there is _The Wicked and Wonderful_ at two…." He drifted off but came back to reality when Harry snorted. Ron stabbed his shoulder with his finger and scowled. "But that's only because it's naptime, and I listen to the radio when I do the dishes!"

Harry offered him the greasy bag of samosas. "Riiiiiiiiiiight."

Ron dug into the bag, whipped out a samosa and bit it in half, sighing. "Oh, yes." He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he smiled and waved the remaining samosa. "These two have eaten nothing but spag bol for the past three nights. 'Mione keeps eating at the office." He stuffed the remaining half-samosa in his mouth and talked while he chewed, his hand rising in a shield. "Go on, what's going on?"

Harry picked at his food and told Ron about Frobisher and the lights. They conferred about the incompetence of young and incompletely trained Unspeakables. Harry had once considered becoming an Unspeakable, but it had become fairly obvious early in the interview process that they considered him too high profile to be useful. He didn't blame them; even the Auror office still used him as a press magnet and spokesman sometimes. He didn't mind. It was all part and parcel to being Harry Potter, and he'd made his peace with that.

As long as he didn't have to ever talk to Rita Skeeter again.

He told him about Fred and George and their story of the warehouse. Ron retold the story of Draco Malfoy's mental breakdown, and they shared a second of silence in which Harry wondered if fifteen years shouldn't have been enough to alleviate his dislike of Malfoy. Apparently not.

"And to top it all off, I think I'm becoming ill," he added, "and Severus is having an affair."

"Bollocks," Ron said. There was a shriek from the lounge, and he called out, "Daddy's allowed to say bad words!" Harry sensed that this was an ongoing argument.

Ron sat back and swilled his pumpkin juice. "It's not an affair, mate," he said finally, waving his hand. "You're tired. He's busy. You know he has all his creepy potions bullshite." He raised his eyebrows. Ron had never had any love for Severus, but he'd become civil, downright friendly, over the years. Harry suspected that Ron was satisfied as long as Harry was happy, and it was the best he could hope for. It was unfair to ask Ron to completely approve of a man who still took opportunities to insult him to this day.

He also had to concur. Severus did in fact have 'all his creepy potions bullshite'. Harry had long stopped asking about it. Some days he wondered, when Severus smelled off or came back from his rented lab space looking decidedly singed. It actually was better not to know, as Severus would tell him and then roll his eyes and mutter something about not asking about Harry's day.

That was all right, actually, not really discussing that kind of stuff; they'd gone years with sporadic updates on their professional lives. They just weren't that way. Severus didn't care about interoffice politics, or outer office politics, for that matter, as long as they weren't restricting his import and export lanes for ingredients. Harry found that descriptions of drams and draughts and slugs and fawn teeth (ground) was just as much of a sedative as it had ever been when he had been in school.

He picked idly at a piece of chicken. "D'you suppose Frobisher is onto something with this mill-warehouse thingy?" he asked suddenly, eager to change the subject. "I've a mind to go down to the ninth floor and ask what's going on out there."

Ron shrugged. "It couldn't hurt, actually. They like to keep us out of the loop, and then when we come in, everything's need to know until someone loses an eye. And then it's all 'Oh, sorry about the eye, we're mysterious, grar!'" Ron raised his hands into claws and made a face, then rolled his eyes. "Wankers."

"I'll send them a memo," Harry groaned. "Something official and scary. Make 'Milda work for her paycheque."

"Brilliant." Ron dug about for another samosa and grinned, giving Harry the look he used when he knew he was about to be an arse. "Say, this bat creature thing that's popping up everywhere—"

"Working on it," Harry grated out. If one more person asked him what he knew about the vandalism case, he was going to scream. That meant seven people at work this morning, Severus at home, and the 'bearista'. He had half expected the Muggle who handed him his take-away this afternoon to say, 'Say, about that mysterious bat-thing…'

Ron smiled. "I take a few years off and you get all the fun cases." Harry gave him the V, but he ignored it, shrugging cheerfully. "If you don't solve it, everyone will keep thinking it's you."

Harry glared at him then. "Who the hell thinks it's me? Have you been talking to Ginny?" He stabbed a piece of onion. "And don't say Witch Weekly."

Ron reached across the table and grabbed a paper from a stack, flipping it over and brushing what looked like porridge off the front. "Kids," he offered. "Can't live with them, can't sell them to the gypsies. Hermione told me I couldn't." He set the paper in front of Harry and pointed. "You've been outed. By the Quibbler."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "You get the Quibbler?"

The shrug was casual. "Luna gave us a lifetime subscription as a wedding present." Then he grinned. "So? Are you Man-Bat?"

The caption read, 'THE BOY WHO IS A BAT?' Harry looked at pictures of himself juxtaposed with the photo from last night and sighed. This was going to get out of control. He could feel it already. It felt itchy.

"What _I_ like," Ron said, raising his eyebrows exponentially and smiling, "is the part where you're an unregistered bat Animagus. A battymagus." He grinned. "So many jokes, so little time."

 

  


* * *

 

The next day, Harry lay on the grass of Hermione and Ron's back garden with a glass of lemonade and Pimm's balanced on his stomach, watching them attempt to assemble The Most Complicated Playset Ever.

Hermione rapped Ron on the head with her manual. "Pay attention," she said, her brows drawn together. "This is important."

Ron flapped his hands and rolled his eyes. "This is a playset," he replied. "Not advanced Arithmancy." He waved a hand at a metal part. "Hand over that…thingy."

Harry watched Hermione glance out over the lawn filled with 'thingys.' He smirked when she rolled her eyes. "Where did you put the gratchet?"

"The what?" Ron asked, his eyes riveted to the two pieces of metal that he was attempting to shove into each other, as if it were obvious that they fit together. "I think we need to borrow Dad's soldering gun."

Harry grabbed his glass, rolled over, and left them there, arguing about what the hell a gratchet was anyway as he went in search of Severus.

Hermione had told them to stop by as she ran past him in the Atrium the night before, and Harry wasn't going to pass up a chance to lie in the sun with a cold beverage and watch his friends attempt to parent; over the years he had developed what he liked to think was a reasonable amount of schadenfreude, though it was all probably something he'd absorbed by osmosis from Severus.

And speaking of the man…

Severus was lounging in one of the outside chairs by the patio doors, his teacup full and abandoned on the table next to him, a newspaper spread all over the surface. Harry glanced at it over his shoulder: he'd circled articles and blurbs from the crime blotter. Harry started to ask, but then he saw that Severus had also typo checked the Apothecary section, and boxed a few want ads for draft potions work.

"Should we help them?" he asked as he pulled a chair over and sat down next to Severus. The man glanced up before retrieving his teacup and sipping from it.

"You want to help assemble the deathtrap?"

Harry glanced back at Ron and Hermione, deeply embroiled in the search for the missing gratchet. "I admit that as much as I like watching them scramble, I fear I would do just as badly. Just because it's Muggle doesn't mean that I understand it."

"You must be joking," Severus said over the rim of his glass. "Even if I weren't feeling ill, what would ever make you think that I'd be willing to submit to such an idiotic exercise as assembling a playset for a child that isn't mine?" He paused. "My child. Horrifying."

Harry ruffled his hair a bit and he had the pride to look offended. "You just don't know what a gratchet is."

Severus snapped his paper and brought it in front of his face. "I'm busy."

Harry sat next to him on the bench and sipped from his glass, staring out over the lawn, where Hermione and Ron were still divining the secrets of Muggle assemblage instructions and Ginny was tumbling around in the grass with Rose and James. He couldn't help but feel a small measure of pride when he looked at his son, but really, he shared Severus's assessment of the concept. Ginny was a better parent than he could ever be, and he'd been more than willing to accommodate her when she'd asked him to lend her a proverbial hand in the situation, but James wasn't his. Not really. Not that way.

A glance at Severus told him that he was all right with that.

"So," Harry said conspiratorially, leaning in and resting his cheek on Severus's shoulder. "Should we beg off?"

Severus rolled the paper into a tube and drained his cup. "Finally," he muttered and rose, stalking off the lawn without a backward glance at Hermione or Ron. Harry shrugged at Hermione and she sighed. Ron just frowned at the instructional booklet and called, "Goodbye Snape," without looking up.

Harry grinned. Sometimes he loved Severus more than he thought was possible.

 

  


* * *

 

Later that night, Harry groaned when Severus ran his tongue up the underside of his cock.

It had started as a simple bedtime routine. He had fully intended on going to sleep as soon as he lay down, but Severus's hands had snaked their way up his sides and onto his chest, and he had responded without considering just how exhausted he really was.

Severus hummed around his cock, tugging his balls and squeezing. His other hand worked his own cock lackadaisically, waiting for a better time maybe. Sometimes it wasn't about them both, he once told Harry, sometimes it was about _doing something_.

Harry liked when the something Severus was doing was _him_.

The bed sheets twisted around Harry's feet when he rolled his ankles. Severus took him completely into his mouth and turned his head a bit, his teeth scraping Harry's foreskin. His hair whispered across Harry's stomach and thighs, and when he spread Harry's knees further apart and cradled Harry's ass in his hands, lifting him off the bed a few inches, Harry arched his back and came.

Short and sweet and ultimately, he thought as he rode Severus's lap minutes later, simple enough for everyday use, this fucking.

Fifteen minutes later, he was able to scrape his voice back together into something audibly useable. "One of these nights, you're going to tell me why we're having all this sex," Harry said, wiping his cock with the damp cloth before tossing it into the laundry bin, where it would probably moulder before he could launder it.

There was a tinkle of glass when Severus returned to the bed, shaking his head and smirking. "No doubt you feel I'm having a midlife crisis of some sort," he murmured. "Maybe I'm having an affair, like you intimated a few nights ago." His voice was tinted with something light, teasing, as teasing as he ever was. Harry liked to think that it was flavoured with cranberries.

 _Are you?_ he wanted to ask. But instead, "I'll be on stakeout tomorrow night."

Severus handed him the water glass and sipped from his own. "So you'll be out all night?"

Harry shrugged, draining the glass and setting it on the nightstand. He flopped back onto the bed. "Yeah," he began, but then yawned and decided not to say anything more. Usually he told Severus more about his schedule. He had never signed the Official Secrets Act, and it wasn't as if he was bound by anything. But if Ginny's plan to catch the Man-Bat (owled to him after they had left Ron and Hermione's and noticeably written on the back of a page of playset assemblage instructions) was going to work, then he needed to be as quiet as possible. Radio silence was easier if one did it all the time and not selectively; that was one thing he remembered from his three days of Unspeakable training.

"I shan't come home then," Severus said mildly. "I have a few things that I could start at the lab which require overnight supervision. This would be convenient."

Harry opened one of his eyes and watched Severus stare off into space, mind already elsewhere as he lounged against the pillows at the head of the bed. His hand clenched the water glass and convulsed once or twice in a squeezing motion.

He didn't have time before he drifted off, but if he had, Harry would have wondered whom Severus was thinking about.

 

  


* * *

 

Harry sat outside the abandoned airplane hangar that the Ministry owned in Macclesfield and used a magnifying spell on his eyes so that he wouldn't have to demand that Colin give over the binoculars. It was easy to see the hangar was not well staffed. Its materials were classified, so it was an attractive spot for the Man-Bat to show up, Ginny had argued. It was probably only a matter of time.

Colin tapped the comm in his hand, a small cell-like device Romilda had made them, and which ran on magic but sent text messages like a Muggle phone. Colin was texting someone with the small slide out QWERTY keyboard.

"I'm sending Susan a smiley. Susan likes smilies."

Harry smirked; if there was one person in the world who didn't like smilies, it was probably hormonal Susan. Or Severus. He wondered if Severus even knew what emoticons were. There were some things Severus was better off not knowing about; there were only so many precious things he could take before he dragged his black clothes from the closet and sat in the lounge with a glass of scotch, reading Camus.

"Let me know if Ginny texts you." He was ignoring his comm until he had to. The strap was bulky and he had already slightly broken it because he had sat on it when it was in his back pocket. Romilda said he was the worst tech abuser, and that was saying a great deal, seeing as how Ginny and Susan had grown up with no knowledge of Muggle tech. In fact, whenever 'Milda tried to explain how she was modifying their tech, Ginny grinned at Harry and said, 'It's like magic!'

He liked to think that he got Ginny. Their kid was lucky. And also doomed.

"She just did," Colin chirped. There was a pause. "El-oh-el."

Harry sighed. "Let me know if she texts anything important." His eyes tracked the lone guard around the hangar. If the Man-Bat was going to strike, he'd knock out the guard, probably. From this angle they could see the guard on the east side of the building. Ginny and Susan had the other corner, watching the north and west. Unless the Man-Bat Apparated into the building itself, which he couldn't do, unless he'd found a way around the Ministry's Anti-Apparition spells. If he had done that, then he was more dangerous than anyone had given him credit for.

Harry wondered when he had started referring to the Man-Bat as a 'he'. One glance at Ginny or Hermione would convince anyone that gender wasn't really a solid factor in determining craftiness or, apparently, the desire for wanton destruction.

Colin turned to him then. "She calls you 'Snitch', right?"

Harry nodded distractedly. "Our code names. We established them early on."

Colin smiled. "You never use her code name."

"Right." Harry looked away from the hangar then, at Colin, and the magnification spell gave him a very up close and personal view of Colin's nose hair. He cancelled the spell before he gave himself vertigo or tore a cornea. He was starting to formulate a plan, but it relied on Ginny being in the right place at the right time. Colin waited. "Oh, it, uh, it rhymes with mine and starts with B." He rolled his eyes. "Of course I don't use it."

Colin winked. "Susan chose mine." It was _Puppylove_. Harry was about to reply when their comms flared to life and he got the text from Ginny that read, 'WHAR R U? GOING IN 5 MIN. TAKE THE ROOF.' Of course, she had her own plan, one that she hadn't bothered to tell the other team, Harry and Colin. She and Susan were obviously the first team. When Harry had questioned her logic, she had smiled at him and said, 'Oh come on, boys versus girls. Like old times!' Harry hadn't the heart to remind her that they'd been out of school for fifteen years.

Harry stood and cracked his neck. "I take that back. I use it when it's appropriate."

That had been part of the plan, too. Ginny and Harry figured that they didn't want to clear their presence with the Ministry beforehand. No telling where The Man-Bat had ears. Bat ears. Harry snorted at the image.

No, no clearing their little stakeout with the Ministry. It had been a moment of clandestine agreement, really, in which they had both decided that the guard couldn’t be trusted with any information, not when Legilimency was such a useful skill, and not completely uncommon. At this point Harry just wanted to get in as quickly and unspoken as possible.

It occurred to Harry that if he was caught breaking into the Ministry building and the press discovered it, no matter what thread the Ministry spun afterwards, everyone would see this as confirmation that he was the Man-Bat. Harry said a silent prayer to a faceless deity and tried to trust Ginny's instincts.

He texted quickly as he left the relative safety of the tall grass. "GOT IT. C IN PLACE. 3 IN. 1 OUT. ROOF NOW."

He was almost to the blind spot that the guard would pass and be unaware of for about fifteen minutes, when he got another text, this one from Susan: "call him puppylove, s.'

Okay, so hormonal Susan had a sense of humor still. Misplaced, but still there.

Harry paused in a crouch in the field just at the edge of the grass that the Ministry really should have been looking after if they didn't want to aid and abet possible infiltrators. The guard was one of those tired sentries who sat at the doorway, and every twenty minutes did a round on the warehouse. Harry figured that he had about fifteen minutes, give or take, that he could use to scale the wall of the building; it was difficult to pinpoint the exact time, because he didn't know where the guard was in his route at any given moment, and he didn't pace himself, but rather walked with the gait of the unpredictable. Maybe that was why he was on duty here and not inside with the other three guards, at whose locations Harry could only guess.

Not for the first time, Harry wished that Romilda would hurry up with those infrared goggles. He wondered if he shouldn't ask the twins about them. It had occurred to him to introduce Romilda to Fred and George, but he was afraid that the resulting explosion was like to kill them all.

He saw a movement from the roof, a little flash of a pocket torch, and he knew that Ginny was already up on the roof, and she was monitoring the guard from there. Harry stuffed his comm in his pocket, patted himself down for loose articles, and pulled his wand. This took a little bit of effort, right here.

Harry waved his wand in a snappish movement, rocked on the balls of his feet and stepped one foot back as if he were about to start a race. " _Aeroscalare_ ," he whispered, and then was off in a blur, feet pounding the ground until he flicked his wand again, thirty feet from the hangar; without slowing down at all, he began to run up the invisible set of stairs he had created out of thin air, each step so fleeting under his foot that if he stopped or slowed they would disappear and he would fall to the ground. Not unlike running across water, really.

He almost stumbled on the last step and he fell onto the tin roof of the warehouse with a thud, but Ginny had already muffled the sound for him, and he didn't have to look sheepish about almost giving their presence away.

"Best spell ever," Ginny said as she pulled him up. "Susan is a fucking genius."

Harry had to concur. He shoved his wand back into his holster and peeked over the edge of the roof for their guard. Ginny faced Colin and flashed her mini-torch. There was a slight flicker of assent, and then she turned to Harry, hands on hips.

"I'd forgotten how much fun that is," she said cheerfully. "Come on, I found the skylight." She turned and whispered over her shoulder, "Really, all that security, and they can't lock a skylight or two."

Harry rather thought that was indicative of the Ministry in general sometimes. He smiled and took another second to look out over the area: nothing for quite a ways, actually. Far off lights of industry and homes, probably Muggle in the distance. The wind picked up and carded his hair, and he closed his eyes and tilted his chin; it smelled a little like rain.

"Oi! Batman!" Ginny hissed. "You'll scare him off."

Harry sighed and followed her into the skylight, clattering on the metal grating of the rafters and balancing precariously as they made their way across the girders to a corner where they wouldn't be spotted by either guards or the Man-Bat if he, she, it had the same idea to come in that way. Ginny braced her back against the outside wall of the hangar and glanced about. Harry settled with his legs hanging off to the side of the girder away from their guards and followed suit.

They waited for about thirty minutes, crouching in the upper levels of the hangar and watching the guards play cards and grumble about their girlfriends and wives and the state of the latest Quidditch match. Ginny turned to him and mimed a 'yak yak' gesture with her fingers, rolling her eyes.

Harry let his mind drift elsewhere. He was tired, and the Pepperup that he'd taken to stave off exhaustion was starting to wear off. Stakeouts were pains in the arse.

The hangar was fairly unremarkable. It had originally been built to house the small planes of World War II, Spitfires and Cessnas and the like, whatever they were. Obviously the Ministry had acquired it at some point, possibly through a purchase, though sometimes they obtained the deeds as 'gifts' from the Muggle government. This one was a document overflow, actually, one of the last ones. Most Wizarding world documents were shrunk and then boxed, filed and stored in the Ministry's vaults, but recent years had seen a massive increase in loose paperwork, and so some of the properties had been allotted for temporary storage. This place, with its boxes upon boxes of papers piled in stacks, was one such place. Ministry policy dictated that the area be secure, no matter what the documents contained. Hence the guard.

The three additional men inside were a surprise, though. They didn't seem particularly busy, actually, which was confusing. He had a hard time believing Undersecretary Weasley would be even remotely approving of paying three men time-and-a-half to sit about and play cards and whinge unless there was a good reason.

Harry found himself wondering about that instead of the real reason he was there. He thought to mention it to Ginny, when they watched the skylight open and a hand snaked down into view, opening so that something small and black could fall down into the hangar proper. Ginny and Harry followed its landing and then pulled their wands when the item in question began to release billows of smoke. The guards jumped up from their card game and pulled their wands, glancing about wildly. Harry was fairly sure that they hadn't seen the skylight open and the smoke bomb fall.

Ginny nudged him then, and the first curse fired off into the smoke as the guards tried to guess from where their attacker was coming. A Stupefy echoed in the room, and there was a thud as one of the guards was felled by friendly fire. Amateurs.

The smoke had spread out into the entire room, thick and dark, about six feet high and rising. Harry wondered if even a Bubble-Head charm would work. Sure, it would keep the smoke out of his eyes, but that wouldn't help much when he wouldn't be able to see three feet in front of him. Ginny tried a few wind spells, but they didn't seem to be doing much except pushing the stuff around.

It was then that the Man-Bat used the skylight, a long cloak pouring into the opening before him, its edges pointed and curling as if it was sentient and searching for things to cling to. One edge ran along the girder, tentacle-like, and curled about the metal strut. It was followed by the Man-Bat, landing on the catwalk and bending down over the railing to examine the smoke below.

"Woah, cape," Ginny whispered. "Memory cloth."

Harry blinked and tried to examine the cape closer. It was hard when it moved so quickly and surely. It had to be alive. Or something. Memory cloth was a myth, or at least it was supposed to be. In the Muggle world, Memory cloth was actually an electromaganetic theory. In the Wizarding world, Memory cloth was sentient material that had been banned in the fifties, if it had ever existed in the first place. Rumour had it that the enchanted cloth had been used in costumes and other places, until it had become a little too independent for its own good and occasionally rebelled against its wearer. Apparently, the Minister of Magic's wife at the time had had a disagreement with her evening gown about the placement of a corsage whilst at the opera, and the garment had abandoned her, taking off for the orchestra pit. Memory cloth had been banned relatively soon after, before most people had ever had time to process its existence in the first place.

But here it was, supporting its wearer, the Man-Bat, who dangled from the ceiling strut with one arm, then dropped to the ground, as if gravity didn't apply to him. Harry swore under his breath and Ginny whistled as they watched the Man-Bat land on the floor in a crouch, and then rise, cloak overly long and moving sedately, curling about his form. Harry cocked his head and felt a surge of jealousy; the cape was cracker.

The cape appeared to be connected to a mask on the Man-Bat's face, obscuring it from the nose up. Bah. Harry should have expected a mask. He was a little disappointed that there weren't any ears, as impractical as they might have been.

Ginny pulled her cell out and texted the release message to Colin and Susan, 'O_O', the agreed upon signal that it was time for them to move. The front door of the hangar had already burst in, and the outside guard called to his compatriots. So much for the Man-Bat knocking him out. Harry thought about how they were going to play this, but the Man-Bat's cape moved and he became invisible in the smoke. With Harry's luck, he probably had some sort of shielding charm that allowed him to see through the haze, maybe something with his mask.

Ginny took a few deep breaths and pointed to the far side of the warehouse, where Susan would be coming from. Harry nodded and sat back on his haunches. Someone needed to cover the skylight, and that was he until Colin made an appearance. With a wave of her wand and another _Aeroscalare_ , Ginny was all but falling off the girder and tumbling into the mist in an almost controlled manner. Harry rolled his eyes and waited.

It was impossible to see anything, and he wasn't sure what the Man-Bat could remotely be interested in, but Harry intended to arrest the man here, put an end to the vandalism. The reality was that deep inside, he didn't actually care about the Man-Bat or the damage he was causing. He was a bit more distracted by the lights out in East Anglia, but bringing this case to a close might get him enough good grace from higher-ups to allow him to poke about in the Department of Mysteries, and that made it worth it.

Plus, setting things on fire was not on, no matter what the twins tried to tell him. There was a time and a place, and that place (and time) was not now.

There were a series of screams, and he heard Ginny shout a Stupefy. Something exploded and papers shot into the air like a fountain. One of the guards was hit with a curse and he flew up, over the smoke and back down, landing with a sick thud. Harry ground his teeth and waited.

Finally, Colin dropped into the skylight and onto the catwalk. As soon as Harry saw him, he made the 'wait here' signal and dropped down into the smoke, his own spells dampening his fall.

The ground level was almost literally swathed with night, and his eyes teared. He cast a Bubble-Head charm so that he could at least save his eyes, and waved his hands. A few wind spells simply succeeded on swirling the mess about. Harry was reminded of the Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder the twins sold; this was like that, but only a thousand times better.

Papers fluttered in the air about him. One of the guards lay on the floor at his feet, and he almost stumbled over the man's unconscious body. Harry followed the sounds of fighting to another area of the hangar, running into several crates and boxes along the way. Ginny's voice was loud as she shouted, and he wondered if she'd managed to corner the Man-Bat, or if she was yelling at the other guards or Susan, or just yelling so that he could find her. He did a Point Me, made it mobile, and followed it through the maze of boxes.

Ginny ran face-first into him, and they reeled a little with the shock of it. Her wand pulled up in the idle position as she grabbed his shoulder. "He's back that way, I think. These blokes are violent. One of them tried to hit me with a _Cruciatus_."

Harry understood her meaning. "Unspeakables?" he mumbled, close to her ear.

Ginny peered off into the darkness through both hers and his Bubble Heads and shrugged. "Too organised for anything else. Take the left, I'll take the right, and don't let them hit you."

Harry tried to focus on her words, but the smoke was clearing, as if it had sensed that it wasn't needed anymore, and he wondered if the Man-Bat was still even on the premises. He let his Bubble charm drop as Ginny dashed off to the left, disappearing behind a column of wooden document boxes. Somewhere in the opposite direction, there were a few shouts, and he wondered where Susan was. It was really a mistake for her to be down here, breathing in whatever smoke this was, not while she was pregnant. He kicked himself that he hadn't thought of that. He chanced at glance up at Colin, but he was too far from the skylight to see anything.

Something whispered around a tall stack of crates, and a few papers floated in the breeze of the departing smoke. Harry dashed forward, reaching out to grasp the Memory cloth before it disappeared around the corner. It was oily and slick in his grip, pulling away from his fingers when he closed them. Its owner tugged at the cloak, but Harry had managed to dislodge it minutely enough that the cowl slipped from Man-Bat's head. Harry raised his wand to cast a Stupefy; this had gone on long enough.

The Man-Bat whirled and tried to pull the mask back into place, but the damage was done. Harry lowered his wand and felt his jaw gaping open. The figure froze, shoulders a little hunched, breathing heavy. The papers fluttered from his hand.

"Severus?"

Severus's eyes widened, and he whirled away, dashing off to the right, through the open hangar door. Behind him, Harry heard Ginny yelling something about tentacles. Oh well, nothing for it. He turned heel and ran towards her voice.

 

 **PART THREE: EVIL IS AFOOT AT THE CIRCLE K**

 _Well, once again we find that clowning and anarchy don't mix._

 

There was toast and jam and tea waiting on the table when he got in that morning. Harry tossed his keys in the bowl on the counter and unbuckled his holster, laying it and his wand and other accoutrements on the sideboard of the dining room as he blinked at the spread in front of him.

Severus strode in, his hands full of plates. "I've eggs, and toast and sausages." He frowned as he set the plate down. "They're those pre-packaged store ones, but beggars cannot be choosers, I suppose." He looked at Harry then, cocking his head. "Are you all right?"

Harry opened his mouth to say something, but he realised that he didn't know how to approach the fact that he'd just come face to face with his husband in the middle of a stakeout-turned-sting, both of which Harry had been forced to label unsuccessful in his report. A report that he hadn't wanted to file, and had simply tossed at Ginny for her signature before storming out of the office.

He hadn't told Ginny or anyone else what he had seen. How could he? Harry wasn't sure that he'd actually seen it himself—Severus in his black cloak, striding across the room, papers in his hands, some sort of industrial espionage, perhaps.

There had to be a good explanation for this.

Severus left the room and returned with a small bowl of porridge for each of them, and he sat down at his side of the table, eyes glinting. He looked as fresh as a goddamned daisy, actually, and for a moment Harry wanted to punch him for that alone. Instead, he dropped into his chair and spooned some eggs onto his plate; the yolks were runny, just the way he liked them. Severus hated runny eggs, so he had to be making up for something.

Oh yeah. Making up for something, all right. Harry spread some jam on a piece of toast and stared at it as it bloomed under the blade, spreadable red.

"How was your night?" Severus said over his toast. "Ministry had you out all night, I see."

Harry dropped his knife. "You can't be serious. You're going to pretend—"

Severus's eyes were searing before they cut away from him, and his hand resumed buttering his toast with the smooth practice of years. "I was going to try to distract you with sex, actually, but I have come to the conclusion that such a tactic is fleeting, and you are not nearly as stupid as I affectionately tell people you are."

Harry picked up his knife again. He could do this. They could talk about this. Severus's manner pretty much said that he was open to it, so Harry dove into the conversation headlong. Except—

"You tell people I'm stupid?"

Severus smiled and sipped from his teacup. "Only sometimes. And stupid isn't the word I use. 'Intellectually deficient' is a more accurate term anyway."

The conversation rather died there, hanging between them. Harry wasn't sure if he wanted to pursue this thread or get back to the matter that was really supposed to be at hand. He chose the latter.

"How long have you been doing this?" Harry raised a hand to stop Severus from replying and instead scrubbed his face with it. "No no, I know that. I have a _file_ of your exploits sitting on my desk at work, as we speak."

Severus snorted. "Exploits. You make me sound like a joy-rider in a Broom shop."

Harry slammed his fist on the table. "That is what you are, Severus, a joy-rider." He leaned forward, not caring that his sleeve was dipping into his eggs. "I do this for a living. It's my _job_. You brew potions. That's _your_ job." Severus opened his mouth to speak, but Harry cut him off with a hand. "They asked you to join the Ministry, several times."

Severus's mouth twisted in distaste. "I refuse to punch a card ever again."

Harry sat back, wiping his sleeve with his serviette. "Well, I'm sorry, but that's what I do. It's not ideal, and I'm not overly fond of it, but there it is. Citizens don't go about fighting crime in their spare time."

Severus said nothing, simply resumed buttering his toast. "I think, Harry, that you'll find I have no time to spare to begin with." He glanced up. "I'm busy."

"You always say that. What have you been doing?"

Severus looked at him for a moment, cocked his head, and then sighed, rolling his eyes. "Your Ministry is corrupt."

Harry blinked. That had not been the answer he had been hoping for. In fact, it hadn't really answered any questions. Except perhaps, 'tell me Severus, how you feel about the current administration,' which hadn't even been on the menu.

The chair scraped when Severus rose, setting down his knife and toast. He left his side of the table and walked towards the kitchen, opened the closest cabinet door, and then began to crawl inside. He was almost completely inside the cabinet when he turned back to Harry, raising a hand. "Come on, then. Let me show you." And then he vanished.

Harry rose from the table and crossed the room, peering inside the cabinet that usually held cereal and other dry goods. Right now it was just a wooden hallway. An ill-lit wooden hallway. He could hear Severus's footsteps in the distance. Oh well, nothing for it, then.

It was surreal, not unlike some children's book he'd once read, entering a cabinet, and really, how this even surprised him despite that he lived in a world that thought it perfectly normal to fly on brooms and transfigure bats into mufflers was shocking in and of itself. Harry ground his teeth as he finally dove into the cabinet, his hands finding the wood walls inside just as narrow as they looked on the outside, but still, they extended farther and farther back, until Harry was sure that the pitch-black passage he was following had gone on for more than the length of the house. He might have been less disconcerted if he hadn't yesterday opened this cabinet, retrieved a box of Weetabix, and closed it, never noticing that it was three miles deep inside.

He finally saw a light ahead and quickened his pace. The tunnel wasn't large, but it wasn't claustrophobic, actually. On the other hand, Harry had heard horror stories of wizards becoming trapped in magical tunnels when both ends closed on them. The thought was enough to make him increase his step and spill out the other side of the tunnel into Severus's hidden room in a rush.

For all that the tunnel was long, the room wasn't the vast cave-like structure he had thought it would be. It was small, about ten by ten feet, the walls plastered with maps and pins, little flags. On a table in the far corner lay an assortment of tools: grapples for something, a belt with vials on it, a coiled rope, a box for a camera that looked suspiciously like the one he'd lost several months ago. It had been a present from Colin upon his graduation from Auror training, and he'd rather liked the Muggle-ness of it.

Hanging from the ceiling in another corner was a gilded birdcage, large enough for Harry to fit himself into if he had been so inclined. It was filled with rolling blackness, and from the scraps and tips that stuck out of the bars and waved, he had a good idea as to what it was.

He reached out a hand to touch the cape through the bars when Severus barked a quick, "Don't touch that," and he pulled his hand back sharply. "It's not stable. That's why I cage it."

The cape stretched towards him, as if it wanted to feel him, and Harry wanted to poke one of the edges hanging out of the bars. "It's Memory cloth, right?"

"After a fashion. It began that way, I suppose. I added a few modifications of my own to make it strong, more tactile." Severus blinked at the cloth as if he were seeing it for the first time before shaking his head and sighing. "It's been a long time since I've had to experiment with Transfigurative and Sentience spells. I fear I might have been a little rash."

Harry peered close and the cape reached out to caress his cheek before Severus tugged on his arm. "I was serious. It'll try to kill you."

Well then. "Why doesn't it try to kill you?" At Severus's look, he blanched. "Merlin, Severus, be careful," was out of his mouth before he realised how futile and ridiculous that sounded.

It was Severus's turn to swear. "Oh bollocks. Like things haven't been trying to kill me for years." He rolled his eyes. "Werewolves, snakes, you, Weasley…" He ticked items off on his fingers as he walked away, his back turned to Harry but his hand raised. "Sirius Black, Neville Longbottom, _multiple orgasms_." Here he paused and glanced over his shoulder. "The list goes on, actually. I think a sentient cape that becomes overexcited at the idea of adventure is something I can handle. Now, come."

The table in the center of the room was long and covered with papers, more maps, some of them animated, and file folders, which Severus was shuffling.

"How long has this been here?" Harry asked, gesturing at the tunnel, the room.

Severus shrugged. "Since we moved in. Standard Panic Room." He glanced at Harry then, looking as sheepish as he ever got, which was sort of like a cross between perplexed and angry. "I suppose I should have told you."

Harry leaned against the table and looked out at the vast surface. "Yeah, that would have been nice."

Severus turned back to the table, on which he was slapping a series of photographs. On his left sat a second stack of buff file folders and a few thumbed-at notebooks. "I suppose I should start at the beginning."

Harry laughed. "We're in your Batcave. You go ahead and start wherever you want."

Severus glared at him. "There are no bats in here." His hands played with the empty folder. If Harry didn't know better, he would have said that Severus was nervous. Maybe he _didn't_ know better. "I'm sure you're curious as to how this started."

Harry almost snorted his own spit up the back of his nose.

"It started simply enough," Severus said, ignoring his paroxysm and laying out pictures on the flat table. "Two months ago, I was in Knockturn Alley when I saw someone being accosted by a few thugs." He shrugged. "It was easy to stun them from a distance and make a quick getaway."

Here Harry nodded; there'd been an Auror report on this crime, the first event that had mentioned a Man-Bat-Thing. He wondered if this had been where Severus had got the idea for the costume in the first place.

"And then, I accidentally stumbled upon a burglary in progress whilst delivering a shipment for Widow Huxley." Severus glanced at Harry. "I didn't want to get involved, but you know how I feel about tampering with personal property."

Oh, did he. They'd been married for ten years, and Harry still wasn't allowed to open Severus's Potions texts. Something about _everything being in place_.

"Three weeks ago, Astoria Malfoy owled me because Draco had gone missing." Severus finished laying out the photos, and stepped back, letting Harry peer over them. They ranged from the outsides of warehouses and hangars and in once instance, a house that looked very much like the Dursleys' old address on Privet Drive. The rows of photos ended with a series of shots featuring Draco.

"He was missing for a week before he just turned up on the lawn in the middle of the night, addled and incoherent." Severus paused while Harry stared at Draco's expressionless and mad face. "She took him to St. Mungo's, but they weren't able to ascertain the nature of his illness."

"Did he just go crazy?" Harry asked. He was rather glad that the pictures weren't moving, because he was fairly sure Draco was about to drool in the picture he was examining.

He didn't understand the photo, nor how it made him feel. There was no love lost between him and Draco, and he would have lived happily never seeing the man again. He usually didn't, except for the casual glance, glare or nod across the Ministry.

"Suffice to say that St. Mungo's didn't try very hard with Draco," Severus said, his voice sandpaper on glass. "There are a great many people who still blame the son for the sins of the father." And then, he added, "I think we both know something about that."

Harry looked up from the photos and smiled. "I could be more forgiving of Draco," he said, "right?"

Severus reached out and touched the edge of one photo, in which Malfoy was dragging a quill across a paper filled with scribbles of green. "I'm saying that a healer or medi-witch takes an oath to provide the best medical care possible, and they failed to do so."

Harry straightened and shoved his hands in his pockets. "All right, table that for later, unless it's relevant."

Severus raised a brow. "It is. Because what is wrong with Draco is not hard to ascertain. I obtained the services of a foreign healer, one untainted by the war." He retrieved another buff folder and flipped it open, revealing a series of swirling images on sheets of paper. They were animated, like a moving photo, but it was obvious that they were recordings of some sort of scan. Severus traced what looked like the outline of a human brain. "Part of Draco's brain has been tampered with."

Harry bent over the scans then. "Where?"

Severus's finger tapped an area of what looked like the frontal lobe. "Right there. I'm not an expert, but I was informed that these parts of the brain are supposed to connect." He reached over the array of photographs and retrieved a large volume labelled 'DSM' and opened it to a marked passage. "The only reason I, or the healer could think of would be this—" He pointed to the page.

"Lobotomy." Harry frowned. "That's…we don't do those, do we? At St. Mungo's?"

Severus shook his head. "As far as I know, the Wizarding world has never supported much in the area of Muggle surgical procedure, for whatever reason." He sighed and waved at the scans of Draco's brain, still swirling on the paper. "And yet."

It was a distressing thought, really, and Harry didn't like the tickle he was getting in his stomach, the one that told him he knew something about all of this. He hated that feeling; usually it meant that he was going to have a big think later until his head hurt and he would still fail to see the connection until it fell into his lap at an inopportune time.

"Why would anyone want to lobotomise Draco Malfoy?" Harry wondered aloud. "I mean, he's a git, but he's not—"

Severus slammed the book shut loudly, even though he tried to make it look for the entire world as if he was just shutting a book and not commenting on Harry's dislike of Malfoy. "I think he found something that he wasn't supposed to find."

Harry was about to ask, _A conscience? Social tact?_ but he stopped himself. That was petty. Also, the pictures made him feel guilty. He settled for folding his arms and trying to look like a professional.

Severus set the book down in the corner of the table again and flipped through his remaining unopened folders, looking for something as he talked. "No matter what you may think about Draco, the fact is that he was as surprised by his father's escape as everyone else, myself included. Lucius was smart, but not that smart."

Harry shrugged and pursed his lips; he didn't really have anything to add anyway. Severus knew how he felt about the Malfoys, and he knew how Severus felt about them as well. Just because someone had a change of heart when the writing was on the wall didn't redeem him or her completely. Lucius had accepted his fate with uncharacteristic grace, actually, and Harry had always rather thought that pensive moment in court had pointed towards his escape plans all along.

"Draco's been looking for his father for years, but recently I know he'd stumbled on something. He sent me some plans and scribbled notes about Azkaban." Severus opened another buff file, this time filled with moving photos of the outside of Azkaban and a few letters in Draco's spidery green handwriting.

Harry took the photos and stared at the stone walls of the prison. The weather there was always stormy, Harry had always noted in the few times he'd been there, and the pictures didn't belie that. Occasionally, a dark shape would flit by one of the prison parapets. Harry frowned as he tried to jar his memory as to what was bothering him about the image.

"There's something wrong with this," he mused.

Severus nodded and took the photos from him, setting them down next to the ones of Draco. "There are barely any Dementors," he supplied.

Harry looked again. "You're right. I didn't think. I knew that they lost a few after the war, and occasionally, they lose a few more, right?" He shook his head. "I always figured that they had a rotating cycle of them coming and going."

"There's more. Azkaban is almost empty," Severus said, flipping a few unmoving Muggletech pictures. "I took these with that blasted camera, about three days ago." He pointed to the outside of the prison with one finger. "There are no Dementors on the outside grounds. Only about five in attendance altogether. I found it easy to walk about."

Harry squinted at the pictures. "Empty, as in…"

Severus crossed his arms. "All the Dark Lord's followers are gone. As are most of the violent offenders. Now it's just thieves and other small-time crimes." He reached out with a long finger and tapped the photo with his last words: "Not. One. Murderer. Not. One. Death Eater."

"And you think Draco found them."

Severus shrugged. "He found something."

"And that's what you've been doing. Looking for what he found."

Shrug. "I still stop the occasional crime, as I find them. It's actually harder to stumble on them than you might think. It makes my goals seem more diverse."

"Oh Merlin's balls, why didn't you come to me?" Harry groaned. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. It occurred to him that he hadn't slept since the night before last, and he wondered if he'd remember any of this at all after he woke up. It was just bizarre enough that he might be able to write it off as the inner workings of his sleep-deprived mind. On the other hand, he was pretty sure that he wanted to remember.

"And tell you what?" Severus raised a brow. "Draco found something off and got his brain addled? Azkaban is being systematically emptied and its prisoners transferred elsewhere? Tell me that is being done without Ministry consent."

Harry shrugged. "If there aren't any Dementors, they might have escaped…" As he said it, he knew that it was temporising. If people were going to break out of Azkaban, some of them would be thieves. The selection, if Severus was correct, was less than random, or luck. His Wizard sense was tingling. Or maybe he just needed more caffeine. Or some sleep.

"I believe you are, despite your best efforts, what you amusedly refer to as 'the man'." Severus shuffled papers and photos back into the files. "If I had told you, then you'd use Ministry connections. And you, being not the most, _discreet_ of all God's creatures, might have stumbled into a similar fate." He looked away. "I've seen Draco lately. I don't wish that on anyone. Especially you."

Harry forgot, sometimes, that they were married. Not because it wasn't a marriage, and not that he didn't love Severus madly, but because at times like this, they fell backwards, all the way back to the past in which they hated each other, in which they bickered, in which their whole relationship had consisted of insults and tension and misunderstanding.

"Well, I know now," he said, "and I can help."

Severus opened a folder and dumped the contents haphazardly on the table. Photos fluttered out like dead leaves. "Fifty prisoners, unaccounted for. All of our most dangerous wizards, out there somewhere, and no one in the Ministry is concerned." He stared at Harry and placed his palms flat on the table. "That is worrisome."

Well, Severus always was one for understatement. Harry's eyes ran over the photos, finding faces he wanted to forget: Dolohov, Nott, Carrow. Lucius Malfoy. Harry sighed.

At least Severus wasn't having an affair. He wasn't sure if that was better or worse, and for whom.

 

  


* * *

 

Level Nine looked to be all but deserted as Harry made his way down the hallway. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to announce his presence, or if they already knew that he was there. He turned about and looked for some sort of desk. Maybe he had to sign in. Maybe he needed a special pass. To be fair, he hadn't been down here in years, and they seemed to change the layout every other week. It was a requirement of the Department of Mysteries, he figured. Because of the 'Mystery' part.

Maybe he needed to actually call out.

He was about to scream something awkward like, 'Hello? It's Harry Potter? From the Auror Department?' when a door opened. Ah, good.

Undersecretary Percy Weasley exited one of the rooms, locking the door behind him with a huge skeleton key. He turned then, and his eyes met Harry's. "Oh! Harry!"

Fascinating. "Hi," he said, raising his hand. "Did you have a meeting down here? I'm looking for someone."

Percy glanced to the left and right and then smiled at Harry. He was looking a little haggard. Harry didn't get a chance to spend much time with Percy, not even in a social setting. He saw him once or twice a year, at one Weasley family function or another, often looking distracted and busy, a perennial workaholic with a secretary in tow, or poring over documents in the kitchen with his wife, Penelope Clearwater, who incidentally worked in the office adjacent to his.

Harry felt a little sorry for Percy. He certainly was where he wanted to be, career-wise, and maybe that made him happy. He just never seemed it.

Like now—Percy's hair was unkempt, and his eyes were rimmed in dark circles. Even as he smiled at Harry, his eyes were already darting elsewhere, not seeing him. His fingers twitched and rolled the sheaf of papers that he held.

"Anyone in particular?" Percy asked. "I know everyone down here."

Harry pulled the card from his pocket and glanced at it again. "Roger Ketterer? Know him?"

Percy smiled, but it was quick, pained. "Lower level man, I believe. I don't really _know_ him in the personal sense, but _of_ him. Is he meeting you here?" He moved to take the card, but Harry palmed it and shoved his hands in his pockets.

"No, I just thought I'd pop down here and see if I couldn't ask about some property he was hanging about. There were some complaints from the locals, and Mister Ketterer wasn't very accommodating when I inquired about it."

Percy rolled his papers tighter and sighed. "Well, I'm sorry, but I know most everyone is out of the office today. I came down here for something and had to help myself."

Harry sensed that he wouldn't be allowed to simply 'help himself'. He wasn't completely surprised; okay, he wasn't surprised at all. Hell, he wouldn't like it if people started to dig about in his desk either. It was irksome that he'd have to come back later, though. He had plans.

Those plans involved a field trip with Severus. Harry was still digesting the events of yesterday morning, when he'd spent two hours in a dimly lit room with Severus, poring over the remaining photos and maps and files, tracing Severus's research and travels.

Harry waved at the wanly smiling Percy and walked to the lifts. Percy didn't move, and Harry guessed that he either didn't trust Harry not to snoop around (and in the past he might have, when he had been younger), or he wasn't finished with whatever it was that he was doing down here in the first place. It really wasn't for Harry to say, actually.

It was frustrating, Harry thought, being sandbagged. Ron used to refer to it as being cockblocked, but Harry wasn't sure he agreed with the sentiment. It wasn't as if he was trying to get laid here. Just a little information would have been nice.

He made his way into the office and sat down at his desk, shaking his head at his inbox, once again full. It was rather like the paperwork never ended. Sometimes he felt like all he did was paperwork. He checked his watch. He was to meet Severus in an hour, and he had to manage to find Ginny before then. In the meantime, he could give 'Milda a break and look at some of the paper in front of him, as if he could accomplish anything by simply looking at it. One day he wanted to invent a quill that would work simply by thinking at it. On the other hand, he was fairly sure that his reports would then be punctuated with pornographic sequences. Perhaps that would make his superior's day.

The first thing in the pile was a familiar envelope. It was the letter he'd jotted off to Amos Frobisher after meeting the man. Frobisher had been right about the Ministry needing to be more proactive and communicative with civilians; Harry felt bad that his office hadn't been more responsive of his complaints, and so he'd written a quick note to tell Frobisher that he had been over to the property and was _definitely_ investigating the matter further.

He thought he had submitted it in time for the afternoon owling. "'Milda, I thought you sent the post yesterday."

Romilda widened her eyes and then narrowed them. Ooh, bad day already. "I _did_ ," she told him. "That was sent back, which you would know if you had looked closer." Harry flipped the envelope over and saw the stamping from the Owl Post, in red letters: RETURN TO SENDER. Oh.

Why would Frobisher return his letter? He added it to the growing list of things to do when he had the time. Right now, he was looking for his absent partner.

"Did you see Ginny?" he asked absently, tossing the letter on a pile of papers in this inbox. Colin entered the room, took a panicked look at Romilda and backed away. Harry glanced between the empty doorway and his assistant.

"I'm not her keeper," 'Milda snapped. Her face was red and Harry noticed for the first time that morning, her hair was in disarray and she had what looked to be a streak of motor oil across her front. "Check her schedule."

Harry shook his head and reached across the desk to snag Ginny's self-updating calendar. It said, 'MIA.' That meant she was either in the toilet or down getting coffee. "Are you sure you're okay?" he mumbled. "I mean, tell me how you really feel."

'Milda slammed a ream of paper on the desk and the packaging snapped in the middle. That seemed to be what she wanted, because she pulled the two halves of the packaging off and tossed them in the bin by her desk. "Colin forwarded a Twitter message to our cell network ten thousand times," she muttered. "I've been getting Tweets of his cat licking his genitals all morning."

Harry glanced at his active mobile on his desk, its message light blinking menacingly. "Oh dear."

Romilda snorted and divided the paper into sections, plunking a thick slab of it in the loose paper box that he and Ginny split in the center of their desks. "It's fine. It was funny the first time. The last nine thousand plus, not so much."

Harry shoved away from his desk. "I'll just go find her myself, then. And we'll be out of the office for a few hours, yeah?"

Romilda waved him away, and Harry beat a hasty retreat, pocketing his mobile and wondering how the hell he was goIng to clear all the text messages. Was there a 'delete all' function?

Colin was still lingering about in the hallway. "I didn't mean to do it," he said to Harry. "Do you think she'd be happy if I got her a gift? A fruit basket? A coffee?"

Harry ignored his distress and instead threw a conspiratorial arm about his shoulders. "Colin," he said, "I need you to run an errand…"

Fifteen minutes later he was in the Atrium, listening to the 'bearista' as she explained the finer points of Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Syrup and how it wasn't risky at all to use it because Earwax wasn't one of the flavours in the bottle. Harry read the side of the bottle sceptically; he wasn't too fond of beets to begin with, and putting it in his coffee sounded obscene and vaguely Russian. The last thing he wanted to taste was caffeinated borscht.

He never got to order, and he wasn't really interested anyway, since he wasn't tired. For the first time in weeks, he felt energised, as if someone had slipped him a stimulant. But that was something to think about later, because the object of his quest walked out of the Women's Lounge, Hermione in tow.

Harry intercepted them at the lifts, and he noted that Ginny already had her wand and holster on her. All geared up, then. He slipped her phone with its blinking red light (let her clear her own damn messages; it had taken him five minutes of hitting 'dismiss' and 'erase' to clear his) from his pocket and palmed it as he sidled up to her and grabbed her elbow.

Ginny grinned. Hermione waved at them and got on the lift with a wink.

"Snitch," Ginny said in greeting over her coffee cup, "have you ever wondered just what coffee with a shot of molasses tastes like?" She held out the cup. "I hadn't, but now I'm glad I did. I have a sugar high like you wouldn't believe."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Hermione is a bad influence on you."

"Well, someone has to be," she grumbled, but her face was pleasant. "I think I'm going to ask out meat pie man."

"That's great," he said, pulling Ginny into a corridor and casting a _Muffliato_. "Look, we have a field trip to make, and you need to know some things first."

 

  


* * *

 

Severus met them at the gates to the Malfoy Manor. He looked decidedly cold, and the air was chilling, Harry had to admit. He and Ginny pulled their cloaks tighter around them as they trudged up to the gates. Malfoy Manor had surely seen better days, but it appeared that most of the house was completely intact. It wasn't that it was in disrepair, but more like the gardener had taken a few years off; the walls were overrun with some sort of creeping ivy. He had a hard time believing that Draco wouldn't keep the house up.

Who knew? Maybe he liked it that way. It was kind of charming, in that 'Hound of the Baskervilles meets The Amityville Horror' way. He turned to say something to Ginny about it, but then he realised that neither of the people with him would understand the references. Sometimes it was hard coming from a Muggle background to the Wizarding world.

Severus nodded his head at Ginny with a mumbled, "Ginevra," because he knew it irritated her. Harry glanced up at the walk that led to the house and sighed. He wasn't looking forward to this.

Ginny was already in rare form. "So," she asked brightly, her eyes gleaming as they started the short ambling walk up the unpaved lane, "how does one become the night?"

Severus glared at her. "I have no idea what you mean by that."

Ginny flapped her hands in a very bad halfhearted impression of a flying bird. "You know, Man-Bat, saving the weak, helping the helpless or something." She grinned. "So altruistic. I would have never guessed it was you."

Severus shook his head and rolled his eyes. "I would hope not. Anonymity is rather a necessity, and one that I seem to no longer enjoy," he grumbled, glaring at Harry.

Harry shrugged. "I tell her everything," he said, and then smiled. Let Severus chew on _that_ for a while.

The rest of the walk was silent. Harry had told Ginny everything he knew, which, Severus had assured him, was everything _he_ knew. It was little. Draco was insane. Draco had been lobotomised. The Ministry was possibly behind it. Azkaban was slowly emptying itself of prisoners, all missing. That was quite a story, and Harry was looking forward to solving it in short order, or proving it not a mystery at all. Unfortunately, even if there wasn't a mass conspiracy connecting everything, there was still a massive assault case and the mystery of the vanishing criminals. In his head he pictured them all jamming themselves into a clown car and taking off for parts unknown. They could only be so lucky.

The door was answered not by a house-elf, as Harry had thought it would be, but by Astoria Malfoy herself. Her face was drawn and pale, without make-up or her signature coiffe of ice-blonde curls piled high on her head, a modern day Marie Antoinette. Her dress was still as fashionable as ever (Harry remembered seeing the exact dress in the window at Twillfit & Tattings weeks ago, in a lovely shade of jewel green), but she hadn't done more than put it on; she hadn't added any jewelry or other adornments. Oh, he was reading too much into her dress. Maybe Astoria just didn't wear any of that at home.

Somehow, he doubted it.

"Astoria," Severus said, grasping her hands in his and pulling her towards him in an embrace. Harry watched the exchange with detached interest. It wasn't that Severus didn't hug him, it was that Harry rarely saw him hug anyone else. The last time he'd seen Severus hug another human, it had been at Ron and Hermione's wedding, and Molly had been quite squiffy and crying.

"Severus," she whispered, or maybe her voice was just worn out. "And Harry Potter." She sounded less happy to see him. Harry rarely interacted with Astoria Malfoy, but he'd tried to be civil, friendly, welcoming. They just weren't ever going to be friends, and he guessed that would be okay.

She seemed to notice their Auror robes, the holsters, the pouches at their belts, and her eyes narrowed. "Aurors. I think we've seen enough of your lot for the rest of our lives," she hissed.

"They're here officially," Severus said softly. "We need more help to find whomever Draco ran up against. Severus pushed her back, and she let him walk her into the foyer of the house. "They are completely in my confidence. And they can be discreet," he finished, glaring back over his shoulder at Harry and Ginny, who shoved her hands in her pockets and examined the paintings on the walls as they entered the house.

Harry didn't have a chance to gawk at the interior of Malfoy Manor, because his phone vibrated and everyone stared at him. Ginny smirked as he pulled it from his pocket and slid it open. "Let me get this," he mumbled, feeling quite Muggle for a second and stepping away from then group to slouch in the doorway of the room.

Colin had sent him a text, and it wasn't of his cat: _'s—you were right. frobisher is gone. packed up last night and disappeared. neighbours concerned. gave me jam. p.'_

Harry slammed the phone shut and glanced at Ginny, nodding. One more puzzle piece that didn't fit anywhere yet but just hung in the middle of the framework they were assembling, a piece without an anchor.

Astoria gave him a look that he understood to be contempt for the Muggle technology he slid in his pocket, and then she turned and walked down a hallway. Severus followed her, gesturing to them with two fingers. Ginny shrugged and they trailed behind.

Malfoy Manor was full of paintings of platinum and blonde-haired beings. Harry wondered if they had Veela in their line somewhere or if all babies who were born into the house were spelled with that colouring upon birth, just to maintain a pattern. A painting of Lucius Malfoy scowled at him as he passed, and he couldn't help grinning and giving it the V. Ginny snorted.

The hallways led them through to a great room, lined with more photos and pieces of furniture older than all of their combined ages. The heavy green velvet curtains had been pulled back, and the weak sun threaded into the room, dust filled spindles illuminating the massive wooden table that stood to the far side of the room.

Draco sat at the table, his hands busy tracing patterns of figure eights on the wood, index fingers pointed like claws. His back was curved as he hunched, and his long hair had been pulled back into a haphazard tail. When he drew nearer, he could hear Draco mumbling under his breath, his upper body rocking back and forth with the movements of the patterns that he traced, leaning forward to stretch his arms out at the top of the eight and then leaning back in his chair when he moved his hands towards himself to round the bottom of the figure.

Severus pulled out the chair on Draco's left and sat down. Astoria hung back in the doorway, her hands wringing a lace handkerchief, and pursing her lips.

Draco looked at Severus when he pulled up the chair. "Oh, hullo," he said cheerfully. "I was just thinking about you."

Severus sat back in the chair. "How are you today, Draco?"

Draco grinned. "I want to explain the faeries, but they keep taking my pudding."

Ginny looked at Harry, her eyes wide; he hadn't been prepared for what they were seeing either. He'd _known_ that Draco was ill, but he hadn't really understood just how ill, even though he'd seen the pictures. Draco was mad.

Severus's hand reached out to still Draco's hands in his own, and the younger man just pulled them away and smiled, retracing the patterns without looking at the table, as if he had to continue to move. "Draco, I want to talk you about your trip away, before you came home. Do you remember the hospital?"

Ginny shook her head minutely, her eyes riveted to Draco's hands as they moved on the table. Severus set his own hands in his lap and sighed.

"I remember everything," Draco snapped a little, his fingertips coming to rest on the table in staccato. Harry felt as if he were eavesdropping on some other conversation; it was almost intensely private, especially when Severus leaned back in again and put his hand on Draco's shoulder, pulling a handkerchief out from his sleeve and using it to wipe at Draco's mouth when a small spattering of drool appeared at the corner. Draco smiled and blinked his wide eyes.

It was unnerving. Harry thought back to all the times he'd said or thought horrible things about Draco. It wasn't that he regretted them, not really, because Draco had never been a saint. It was more that Harry wasn't sure that he would have wished this on anyone, not even Draco.

What if he couldn't be repaired? What if the damage was permanent? Harry suspected that if the healer could have repaired the damage to Draco's brain, then he would have already done so.

"Before you went to the hospital, you were on the lawn, do you remember?"

"Of course. My toes were soggy."

Severus glanced back at Harry then, his face pained. "And then, Draco, before that, do you remember where you were?"

"Father always said I was bright. They took him from jail, you know."

Ginny frowned and Harry realised that he hadn't told her everything, mostly because he wasn't sure himself what to think about the situation. He had decided that he wasn't going to tell her about Azkaban and the Ministry connection. If he and Severus were wrong, well, then, there would be less of the hysterical mess out there.

"Draco," Severus said softly, "where did you go?"

Draco traced the design on the table again. "If I work the pattern enough, I can make a pixie come out of the grain," he told them. "Make the green lights come."

Ginny jolted back as if she'd been slapped, and Harry felt his face draw up in a frown.

"Where, Draco?" he asked, leaning over Severus's shoulder to come face-level to Draco. "Where did you go? Were there green lights there?" Severus glanced back at him, and Ginny raised an eyebrow, but Harry stared into Draco's eyes and thought about a dead tree in East Anglia.

Draco smiled at him. "They flashed the lights. There was a big. Big flash."

Astoria sighed, but it came out like a strangled sob. Harry could see Ginny move out of the corner of his eye and he knew that she would at least try to do something with Astoria. Harry didn't want to think about what he would be like if it had been his husband sitting there. Severus sat back then, his back connecting with Harry's front, and Harry couldn't resist resting a hand on the man's shoulder, even though it was shrugged off almost instantly.

"Green lights," Severus said to him. "I thought we'd had our fill of green lights."

Draco traced the pattern on the table. "You know, the faeries, when they come, they have cake."

Harry glanced back at Astoria resisting Ginny's compassion and standing ramrod straight in the doorway. From behind her skirts peeked a pair of eyes, little Scorpius watching his father fall apart.

Something in Harry clicked a little, like tumblers in a lock. "Severus," he said softly, "I know where they're doing this."

 

 **PART FOUR: WAIT, WHEN THE HELL DID WE BECOME THE JUSTICE LEAGUE?**

 _You know, gang, when you're a superhero, you never know where the day will take you. You may find yourself halfway around the world in the shark-infested waters of true-to-life living. Or you may find yourself going down to the store for a lozenge. You can't know, can you? No. You gotta ride that wave, you gotta suck that lozenge. 'Cause if you don't, who will?_

  
Ron loved painting his face whenever they went on a stakeout or sting. Harry had forgotten about that fact, and when Ron had met them in East Anglia, his clothes pitch black and his head covered with a black skullcap, Harry had almost laughed at his paint-streaked face.

"What?" Ron said, glancing from him to Severus, "I'm pale, all right?" He spread his hands and gave his sister the V when she whistled as she approached. The night had already fallen in East Anglia, and they gathered in a small copse of trees that brushed the property, perhaps fifty yards from the water mill.

Ginny clapped her hands once and squatted down in the tall grass of the field. Severus moved off into another cluster of grass, closer to one of the only trees in the area, presumably to further observe the guard that was making rounds of the mill.

"Well, people, let's hurry this up. I have a date with Bertram tomorrow night and I'd look to look refreshed and ready for sex."

Ron rolled his eyes and Harry laughed. Off in the distance, Severus snorted. Harry wouldn't have even known he was there if he hadn't watched him hide. "Meat pie man?" he asked. "Gin, you work fast."

Ginny flicked her ponytail has he squatted down next to her. "You should know."

Ron hunched down in the grass and blinked owl eyes through the raccoon mask of the face paint. Beside him, Ginny jostled back and forth from one heel to the other. Harry wanted to still her, but he knew she was just getting herself wound up for what was to come.

'"Mione says that she'd have loved to have been here, but she only trusts the kids with mum and dad right now, and they're still in Moscow."

Ginny rolled her eyes. "That third honeymoon is taking forever," she muttered.

Harry sighed. It was better that the kids were safe. He was suddenly glad for a second that he hadn't any, until he thought of James. What had Ginny done with their son? He felt a little guilty for not remembering right away.

There was a rustle and they turned to see Hermione tromping towards them, her little beaded purse of Holding in her hands, her black clothes tight against her body. She gave them all a glare and crouched down next to them, pulling her hair into a fierce tail that she rolled into a bun as she talked.

"Look, you were all in the first place I looked." She glared at Harry. "I can _smell_ your after-shave." She glared at Ron. "You need to learn volume control and you—" She grabbed Ginny and forced the woman to stop rocking. "Fidget too much."

"And me, Ms. Weasley-Granger?" Severus said in a whisper from where he had been lurking and using the distance spell to see the warehouse guard detail. Hermione squealed and lost her balance, toppling backwards onto her rump.

Ginny pulled Hermione to her feet and she snorted. "You are fine," she grudgingly admitted.

"Where are the fruit of our loins?" Ron asked amusedly.

Hermione righted herself and opened her bag, rummaging around in it. Harry spared a thought, when she didn't answer immediately, that the children were in the bag, but then she smirked. "Oh, they're with Angelina. I hope that's alright with you, Gin."

Ginny waved her hands. "If he comes home from there with three nostrils again, I personally blame you."

Hermione grinned. "Done."

Severus moved back into their group and sighed. "If we're done with the child custody shuffle," he said, in a voice that reminded Harry of his years in the Potions room at Hogwarts. Later he would ask Severus how it felt to be storming the castle with four of the biggest pains in his arse to ever haunt his classroom. Ginny just smiled and Hermione rolled her eyes. Ron looked at Harry and made a loose wanking gesture with his hands. Harry would have been offended on Severus's behalf if he hadn't reached out and smacked Ron in the back of the head.

"I wager, based on what I've seen in the past three hours," Severus told them while resolutely not glancing over to Ron, who was rubbing the back of his skull and smiling. "That we have about ten minutes before that guard comes back. We should move now before we have to wait for another hour."

Hermione opened her purse. "Do we need a distraction? I have something for that—"

"We use this—" Severus pulled a small canister from his bag and turned it.

Harry frowned at it; it was round and metal and suspiciously familiar. "George and Fred were working on something that looked like that. What was it?"

Ginny shrugged. "Whistle Jammies?"

"Whistle Jimmy," Severus replied. "Though why they call it that I have no idea." He turned it in his hands, pointing at the pin in the top. "It should make quite the distraction, should we require one."

Harry took the Whistle Jimmy from Severus's hands. "Wait a minute, are you saying the twins made this for you?"

Hermione shook her head but didn't offer commentary. Instead she dug about in her purse and retrieved a small bag of what looked like Dungbombs. What, was everyone packing some sort of incendiary device? He looked at Ron and expected him to pull a grenade from his socks or something.

"Messieurs Weasley and Weasley have made several things for me in the past few months," Severus told them all, as if it was perfectly normal to have a smoke bomb the size of a niffler on one's person.

Harry checked his holster and supplies as he bantered. Ron passed him the face paint and he declined. Ginny took a swipe of the black and painted under her eyes, like she used to do in Quidditch games back at Hogwarts. "So the twins have been like, your Q?"

Severus pulled his cloak from his bag and Hermione and Ron cursed as the blackness of it spilled out onto the ground in front of him and began to uncurl and move of its own volition. Harry might have been more surprised if he hadn't seen the show already. Ginny's fingers twitched on her knees and Harry knew that she wanted to try it out. He grabbed one of her hands and shook his head.

"That has to be some sort of Muggle reference I don't know about," Severus told him, "so let's just declare that we are ready to move." He looked at them all, the cloth dangling from his hands. "I shall come from the roof. Miss Weasley and Mrs. Granger-Weasley will come from the far side." He gestured with one hand. "And Harry and Mr. Weasley will come in the other side entrance. If there was a sub level accessible from the outside, I would suggest using it, but I have yet to discern one."

Harry was going to protest, say something about how he was the one in charge and should be making the plans when he realised that he hadn't really thought of a plan anyway. He hadn't had much chance to work with Severus during the war, but he hadn't been a bad planner or team player, to hear Arthur talk about it.

Plus, that was pretty much what Harry would have said anyway. He spared a thought that they were becoming more alike, but dismissed it as sentimental—strategy did not follow love, only logic.

Harry waved his comm at Ginny, and she waved hers back. "We'll stay here. You message when you're in place. And you—" He pointed a finger at Severus, who was in the process of slipping the cowl of the cape over his head. "Wait for a signal. Stay out of sight until it's clear. I can't comm you, so I don't want to have to worry that you've beaten us to the punch."

Severus rolled his eyes under the cowl and stalked away through the tall grass, pausing to lurk behind the few available tree trunks. Harry glanced at the building again. "All right, then."

Ginny held the flat of her palm out and waggled it back and forth. "See you on the flip side."

Ron sighed. "I thought she'd be less strange as she got older." He glanced at Harry as they sat there and watched Ginny and Hermione stealthily creep their way across the grass. "Who's Bertram anyway?"

Harry searched the darkness for Severus, but he was long gone, disappearing into the blackness while Harry had been looking elsewhere. He wondered how Severus was planning on to get up onto the roof, and if he shouldn't have taught him _Aeroscalare_. On second thought, maybe the cape could levitate. Or Severus had his own spells for defying gravity.

"Don't worry. He has a lovely arse," Harry offered, mostly because he loved tweaking Ron's denial of his sister's sex life. Also, that was pretty much all he knew about Bertram the meat pie man. Aside from the meat pie business, which went to other filthy places that Harry didn't even want to think about. Not with the mother of his child.

Ron sat on his rear in the grass and cracked his knuckles. "You know, I'm glad you called me in and all, but why didn't you just call Colin and Suze?"

Harry watched the guard round the water mill. Oh joy, it was Roger Ketterer. Mister Ketterer looked about, then glanced at the windows of the mill, which then came alive with a swath of green. The lanterns that hung in the half-boarded windows shone like brilliant beams, and a low, droning noise issued from the mill.

"Because you're available. Susan is pregnant, and I don't want to take her somewhere she might be hurt."

Hermione would rip your face off for that," Ron replied, staring interestedly at the lights. "That's new."

Harry nodded. "It is." He pushed some of the grass out of his face and counted himself lucky that he wasn't allergic to ragweed. "And Hermione be damned. If something happened to Suze tonight, I would never forgive myself." He glanced at Ron. "And Colin, well."

Ron grinned. "I think Ginny and Colin should work together when Suze goes on leave. I'll come back early just to watch the maybe---woah!"

Harry was glad that he had been looking over at Ron, because the droning suddenly coalesced and crescendoed into a high-pitched screaming sound, and then the green lights grew bright and brighter until they were so bright it was hard to see, even with his closed eyes. He raised a hand to shield himself and hoped that everyone else was doing the same.

It couldn't have lasted longer than ten seconds, but what a loud bright ten seconds they were, Harry thought, shaking his head and grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes. Beside him Ron cursed and scrubbed his hands with his face. He looked over at Harry. "I think that merits a 'what the bloody hell was that?'"

Harry blinked at the mill, its green lights dim and innocuous again. The tree in the center of the courtyard waved in the breeze. Smoke rose from the tips of its dead branches.

"I think we should find out," he mumbled, scanning the roof for signs of Severus, but predictably finding none.

His comm lit up, and he glanced at the mobile: 'WTBHWTB???!!11'

Harry slid the keyboard out and felt Ron's breath tickle his neck as he texted back. 'in position?'

He waited for a full minute, glancing from the display to the mill with its lights fading, and Mister Ketterer standing in the courtyard by the dead tree, shaking one of its limbs.

Finally, 'READY. GO IN THREE.'

Harry smiled. Ginny always got to pick the timing. It wasn't a rule or anything, it was just what she did. He replied something to the effect of 'Roger' and tucked the phone away in a pocket where it wouldn't get banged about, leaned forward and did a pushup so that he could lie low and stretch his cramping legs, and looked at Ron. "In two."

Ron pulled his wand. "Just like old times."

"Which old times? Voldemort old times or Auror old times?"

"I was thinking of that stag night you threw me."

Harry grinned. "You were very brave, crashing into Hermione's bedroom like that."

"Yeah well," Ron admitted as they dropped their voices and began to creep through the grass to the entrance. "I like to think that was the Ogden's."

Harry snorted. "That wasn't Ogden's. That was butterbeer."

"On an empty stomach!" Ron hissed, and they cleared the grass. Harry took a second to consider that they were the worst operatives ever, but they'd fallen back into routine, and it felt rather nice to be able to do it with Ron, who was good at his back and anticipated his moves. They probably should have been a smidgen quieter, because Ketterer chose that moment to round the corner and he spotted them immediately. Harry hadn't anticipated that. It was just their luck that the one time he needed to piss or something was the exact moment that they were trying to infiltrate the mill.

Ketterer raised his wand, possibly to hex them, possibly to send off a warning, but before he could, something fell from the roof and hit him in the head. Harry froze, his wand drawn, Ron backpedaling beside him, and they watched Ketterer's body fall to the ground with a thud, followed by the inert Whistle Jimmy, which had apparently caught him squarely in the skull. Well, that was one way to distract and divert attention. Ron dashed forward to kick the man's wand away, and Harry peered up at the roof, which was completely normal-looking except for the minute curl of black cloth peeking over the edge of the thatching. Ron held his wand on the man until he could poke him experimentally with his boot.

Harry checked the mobile clock again. They were going to be late to break and enter if they didn't move soon. He and Ron dragged Ketterer's body into one of the shadows of the mill and left him there.

There had been no more noises or lights from the inside of the mill, though the incandescent lights still shone brightly inside, bathing the courtyard area in a yellow light. The dead tree cast a long shadow on the warehouse behind it, like black tendrils that held the building down. Harry wondered what was in those buildings, too, but all of the activity seemed to be coming from the mill, so that was where they were going to start.

Harry turned the knob on the door and leaned on it a bit, and he was rather surprised to find that it was not only unlocked, but also rather loose. One would have thought that secret hideouts should have been harder to break into, but there they were, stumbling into a small alcove that fed into a much larger room.

The mill was fairly unremarkable in and of itself, just as unremarkable as the outside with its boards and rotting planks. The green lanterns hanging from the ceiling in various places in the room made up the lone spots of colour. From the bottom of the lanterns hung thick ropy cord that twisted to the ground before coiling across the floor and gathering at the base of a stocky wooden chair in the centre of the main room.

All the equipment that has once been useful in…water milling? Harry guessed, was pushed to the walls of the room and left to gather dust or covered in filthy sheets. Harry and Ron crept across the raised platform of the doorway, and watched as the green lights pulsed in intensity a little, but nowhere near as strong as they had earlier.

"The first pass didn't work," said a man's voice, and Harry and Ron had to duck back into the shadows to be sure that they hadn't been seen. "We'll have to run it again."

Harry peered out of the dimness to look at the chair, and the figure strapped into it. It was a male, suspiciously familiar, but it was rather difficult to tell when the person was only in profile. He turned to Ron and raised his brows, and Ron just shrugged.

"One more time and the tissue will be ruined," said another voice, belonging to a man who approached the chair from the other side. Something about him also seemed familiar, but it was hard to tell. Harry tried to search his memory for all the faces he'd seen over the years and made no note of; not for the first time, he was glad that Kingsley wasn't his immediate superior anymore—if he had to write this up and he couldn't place the men he was about to hex into tomorrow, Shacklebolt would have had his arse on the carpet.

"Henders," Ron whispered, "Unspeakable." When Harry looked over at him, he shrugged. "Hit on Hermione at the Christmas Party three years ago and I had to punch him."

Harry laughed and turned back to the scene, where Henders was joined by another man, also probably an Unspeakable. "It's not like we don't have others. I keep telling you that," he told Henders.

"I still don't like the idea. It's…it feels wrong."

"If you're still having that problem, Handers, then let someone Obliviate you and ask for reassignment."

The man in the chair moaned. "He keeps doing that," Henders complained, nudging at the man with a hand. "I thought they said it didn't hurt."

"They said it _probably_ didn't hurt," the other man replied. "And since when do you care? He killed three women with a saw blade."

Harry scanned the other side of the room. He could see the door that Ginny and Hermione would be using, and though he couldn't see a roof entrance, there had to be one, or Severus wouldn't have opted to enter that way. As he was staring, the door shuddered, and he saw Ginny peek into the room. He was about to wave, but he saw her raise her wand and cast an Expelliarmus. So much for letting him take point.

The two men in the room who weren't strapped to the chair turned; they drew their wands and fired in unison, falling backwards in opposite directions, rehearsed, practised, skilled. Harry hid behind a column and heard Ginny cast another curse from the other side of the room. Ron grinned.

"I was right," he said, his face jovial. "Us against the Ministry. Just like old times."

Oh ha ha.

Harry threw a few stunning spells out as cover, and Ron dove to his left. He lost sight of him when he went right and hid behind a few wooden barrels. A curse sizzled past his ear, and he cocked his head, listening for the sound of footsteps that would tell him where his attacker was. Oh, and if he could, he would take note of Ginny's location, too; it wouldn't do to hex his own team mates right now.

He heard someone call out _'Reducto'_ , and of course it was Ginny. She loved that spell; it was her signature move. Bits of wooden barrel went flying, and some even caught in the wall and quivered. Ron yelled "Stupefy!" and there was a thump as a body hit the floor. A few more ...scuffles and curses, and someone else was down too.

"Clear!" Hermione shouted, and he peeled himself from the pillar, rather chagrined that he hadn't the chance to stun or incapacitate anyone. And where was Severus?

Ron and Hermione stood in front of the man in the chair while Ginny tied up Henders and the other man, whose name Harry had never learnt. When Harry joined the two of them they all stared at the chair.

"That's Thulciver McPhee," Hermione told them. "You know, the one who killed his wife and girlfriends a few years ago." She made a noise of disgust and stuck her wand in her holster, a leather belt that had been a gift from Harry years ago. Harry was pleased to see that she still used it at the right times. Hands-free was almost as important as armed, sometimes. "I was on the prosecution."

Ron lifted the McPhee's chin with one finger, and he blinked at them sleepily. "That's why we know him. We arrested him," Ron said dully.

Oh, right. Harry looked at McPhee and wondered if he was all right in the head.

McPhee closed his eyes. "Everything is so green."

Harry jolted and glanced at the green lanterns.

Ginny wandered over to one of the lanterns and yanked on the cord. It fell from the bottom of the lantern in a shower of sparks and the light went out. "What do you suppose they are for?" she said. "I can't imagine they're doing lobotomies with electricity.

"I think, Ginevra, that they're a signal," Severus said as he dropped down from the upper rafters. Ginny and Hermione jumped, and Harry glared as the other man made his way across the room, his cape dragging on the floor in places as if it were licking the grime of the wood. A far hem reached towards the lights and Severus had to grab it with his fist and fling it towards the ground. It was rather like trying to keep a helium balloon from flying away by dribbling it like a basketball.

" _Bloody hell!_ " Ginny breathed. "Wear a bell!"

Severus smiled at her. "I _am_ the night," he told her, his mouth quirked up in a grin. Harry holstered his wand and found himself crossing his arms; he was about to indulge in some admonishment that he could safely file under 'foreplay'.

"You were of precious little help," he groused.

Severus crossed his own arms. His cape wrapped around his waist and billowed like a skirt. "I was told to stay out of the way, since I had no Muggle communication device with which to help plan your…" he paused as he searched, most certainly, for most the irritating words. "Shocking entrance." He turned his head to glare at Ginny. "Expelliarmus? Really?"

Ginny flapped her hands like a bat. "Keep 'em guessing."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "As fun as it is to watch the 'heckle the former teacher' show, we just knocked out our only two leads, and this one here," she gestured to McPhee, "is going to be as helpful as a Blast-Ended Skrewt."

McPhee smiled at her. "You have faerie hair."

Hermione smiled at him. "I think he's addled."

Severus glanced at the lanterns and the chair, at the room around him, as if he was reverse engineering the scenario to see where it led. Harry had seen him do it loads before, for things like, 'How do I make this complicated potion I have never made before and which is toxic and for which I do not have a recipe,' and other things like, 'Where did I last see my billfold? Was it in the kitchen? I shall retrace my steps.'

"They damaged Draco here," he said. "They did it with this chair, or something he needed to be in this chair for." He reached down and undid the leather restraints from McPhee's wrists, and as the man pulled his hands free, a series of tiny needles yanked out of his wrists.

McPhee squealed and rubbed his hands. "I'm telling!"

Severus pulled the man up and transferred him to the waiting arms of Ginny, who cast a sleeping spell and let the man fall with a thump. Severus was already following the trail of the wrist needles down into tubes that ran to the underside of the chair and then into small holes that had been drilled in the floor.

"There's another level," Ron told him, his eyes already sweeping the place for trapdoors and hidden staircases. Harry glanced at his own feet. Ginny started moving furniture and pulling the sheets from the equipment. Then Hermione cleared her throat and they all glanced to her and then followed her pointing finger to the far side of the room, where a staircase with a railing obviously pointed down.

Severus stood and swept past her on his way to the stairs. "Go to the head of the class, Ms. Granger-Weasley."

Harry watched her roll her eyes and follow him down the stairs, casting Lumos with her wand so that they had enough light to see by. That wasn't a half-bad idea. Harry cast Lumos and heard Ron and Ginny do the same. At this rate, they would be able to see quite well even if there wasn't an independent light source down there.

They descended the stairs to the sound of humming machinery, which was in and of itself a disturbingly out of place noise in the Wizarding world. Everyone here was fairly used to Muggle tech, enough that the drone didn't bother them like it did some wizards who were not on speaking terms with technology. Despite that, Harry hadn't been ready for it, and as Severus cast a Lumos spell and the lights began to flare up all around them, the noise only served to punctuate the alien-like ambience of the room.

It was lined on both sides with long vertical glass cylinders, some illuminated in green, others completely black. Inside the illuminated green cylinders bubbled a translucent liquid of some sort. It was actually hard to tell if the liquid was green or the glass that contained it. Harry slid one hand along the tank closest to him.

"They feed it up through the ceiling, and then into the veins, and then they do some sort of spell, or something, something that is killing that tree outside," he said, eyes following the tubing up through the ceiling.

"This has to be the biggest vat of Veritaserum I have ever seen," Severus said, one hand on the glass next to him on the opposite side of the room. "I can't imagine what they would be using it for."

Hermione tapped one of the darker cylinders. "This isn't Veritaserum," she said. "This is some sort of…something."

Severus joined her and they both peered at the glass. Harry suspected that they would have pressed their faces to it like children at the zoo if they had thought it would help to identify the contents.

"It's a Befuddlement Draught," said a voice behind them, and Hermione jolted. Severus turned and pulled his wand. Harry and the others only had to turn, since they were still armed.

Penelope Clearwater leaned against one of the canisters, clutching a series of cords in one hand and her wand in the other. She looked terrible, face pale and drawn, clothes hanging from her as if she hadn't been eating. Her hair was pulled back in a tail, but where it used to be a long full mane, it was stringy and frizzled. Her hand shook as she pointed the wand at them.

"A Befuddlement Draught," she repeated. "Mixed with a painkiller. For the spell. We need it for the spell."

"What spell?" Ron and Ginny asked at once, wands out. Ron glared at Ginny and she stuck her tongue out at him. Harry wished they'd keep their eyes on the crazy-looking lady with the weapon. And apparently a master plan.

"Drop the wands," said another voice, and then an expertly cast Expelliarmus shot out from the side, in between the canisters on Harry's left. Ron fell backwards, and Ginny tumbled to Harry's right, taking cover and also holding herself in reserve just as they had agreed. Ginny was the shadow-man, pulling back until she was needed.

Severus pivoted with his wand, but the Expelliarmus had hit him squarely, and he rubbed his hand with his other one while he looked for his dropped wand. Harry cast a Stupefy, but Percy Weasley took advantage of the situation to physically knock him down, the fall taking them into one of the glass canisters. Harry's head collided with the thick glass and for a second all he heard was a gong noise

By the time he'd managed to right himself, Hermione was unconscious, Ron was out of sight, probably forming a plan with Ginny, because Percy had an arm around Severus's shoulders and was pointing his wand to his throat. Harry shook his head to clear it and raised his wand.

Percy pressed the tip into Severus's neck. "I am quite determined to do him harm, should you proceed, Harry." He backed up against one of the tanks, pulling Severus with him and glancing about as if he was sure that he was about to be attacked from another side. Harry tried not to look at the movements in the shadows behind Percy.

He lowered his wand and let it fall from his hand. Severus rolled his eyes, and even from his captive position, it was a firm order; still topping from the bottom, that Severus Snape.

"I'm so sorry it has to be this way, Harry," Percy said softly. "I tried to throw you off. I assigned you the Man-Bat case, but I had no idea it would lead you all here." He gestured to the rows of tanks behind him, and Harry glanced away from him long enough to take another good look at the glass cylinders.

"Why, Percy?" he asked softly. It was a pointless move, really. He was quite sure that he already knew the answer. On the other hand, getting Percy to talk was a good way to distract him from the fact that he had a wand to Severus's neck, and that Ron was behind him.

Percy sighed. "The Dementors were leaving," he said. "Can you imagine what Azkaban would be like without Dementors? No one to keep those people in there."

Severus's eyes locked with Harry's, and he shook his head minutely. This was what they wanted, really, that big reveal, and Percy was going to give it to them. Harry remembered some of his first interrogation lessons with Shacklebolt, back before he became the Minister of Magic: _Once they start talking, they don't want to stop. They_ want _to tell you the story, Harry, no matter what it means for them, for what will happen to them. Just let them do it, because if they change their mind, you'll never get anything out of them._

Harry clenched his fists. In the corner, Penelope bound Hermione with an angry _Incarcerous_ and abandoned her to stand by her husband.

"Lucius Malfoy broke out of Azkaban, and we knew that something had to be done," Penelope said, her voice full of contempt. She crossed her arms and peered at Severus. "If all the Dementors left, then who could keep the Wizarding world's criminals in their cells?"

Severus rolled his eyes again, and Harry rather hoped he wasn't about to berate the person who was mentally unstable, untied, and also armed. "I don't know, perhaps that would have been an issue for a governing body to decide. If only we had one." Harry cringed, but Severus crashed onwards. "We could form our own. Call it oh, say the Wizengamot."

Percy tapped Severus's neck with the wand. "The Wizengamot said nothing. They said, 'Oh, don't worry, Weasley, we'll take care of it when it becomes an issue.'" He shook his head. "But Lucius Malfoy broke out of Azkaban, and I knew that something had to be done."

Hermione groaned and Harry looked about for either Ron or Ginny. Alas, neither one in sight. He secretly hoped that Ginny was recording the whole thing on her mobile. That would have been useful later. If there was a later.

"So you, what?" Harry asked, his hands still in the air up by his ears. He was getting tired of doing his scarecrow routine. It was becoming clear that the Weasley siblings weren't going to make an appearance until brother dearest had spilled the entire story. He didn't blame them. "You decided that you'd build a prison here?"

Penelope sighed. "It was just supposed to change them a little. Reform them, make them useful members of society, you see." She glanced at Percy, as if she needed his permission or approval to continue and he nodded. "If we cannot hold them, then we need to put them somewhere. Isn't it better if they can't harm anyone anymore? They could even eventually be productive members of society."

Harry wasn't sure why he hadn't seen it sooner, as soon as Penelope had come out of the woodwork, as soon as he'd realised that it was the murderers, the rapists, the _dengerous_ criminals.

"You can't reform them by mutilating their brains," he told Percy softly. "You're violating them."

Percy glanced at Penelope, and she nodded this time, as if he needed _her_ permission. "What about their violations? Don't tell me that you're fine seeing Theodore Nott go free. What if it had been Bellatrix LeStrange? Don't tell me that you'd prefer that she have her _rights_ , instead of paying for all the lives she's taken." Percy sneered and tugged on Severus's chest. "Because they can't be contained without the Dementors, Harry. I'll save us from them, and no one will ever have to worry about it again."

Harry was about to reply, but Severus's cape snagged Percy's arm and yanked, turning the other man's hold so that his own weight was being used against him, and suddenly Percy's arm twisted behind him. For a split second, Harry was sure that they had this all under control. Ron was still tousling with Penelope, and Harry reached out across the floor to snatch his wand back up, rolling around to fire a curse at Percy, if only Severus would get out of the way. The two men tussled over the wand in Percy's hand, and when Severus caught the other man in a poorly-executed face punch, Percy staggered backwards into one of the tanks, which cracked a little with his impact.

It was the opening Harry needed. He fired a curse off, a Diffindo, which burst open the cylinder behind Percy and Severus, and the contents spilled to the ground, the Veritaserum drenching Percy as it dumped on his head and body. Severus rolled out of the way expertly, and Harry spared a smile to know that he'd probably be relieved that he hadn't just been exposed to enough truth serum to keep him from lying for the rest of his life.

Ron had lost his battle with Penelope, probably because he was trying to subdue her gently (and because he was out of practice; Harry would rib him about it later), but that was short-lived as Penelope righted herself over Ron's unconscious body. Harry hit her with an Everte Statum that knocked her into one of the black cylinders and bounced her body, unconscious, onto the floor a few feet behind where Percy stood with his wand out, pointed at Harry, and Severus, who lay on the floor, panting.

"Don't—" Percy said, as if he was unsure of what to say. His eyes were glazing, and Harry wondered if there was more than Veritaserum in that tank. "Just don't, they'll run free, and we'll all suffer." He sighed, and his wand lowered a little, as if he had forgotten it was there. "They're the ones who should suffer."

"Oh Perce," Ginny said softly then, her hands empty in front of her as she walked towards him from her cover between the tanks; his hands shook as he trained the wand on her instead. "You can't be God."

"Ginny," Percy said, "you know how important this is."

"I know. Family gets a free pass," Ginny said brightly, and then swung her fist in a right hook that connected with Percy's jaw, right underneath, and his neck snapped backwards before his whole body seemed to sail through the air. He landed on Penelope, hit his head on the concrete of the floor, and lay still.

Ginny sat down on the floor and checked Ron's pulse. "I was going to say 'free pass….to gaol,' but it felt like overkill," she told him, as off-handedly as ever, as if she hadn't just found out that one of her brothers was running a mass lobotomy experiment, and had instead decked a complete stranger. Her eyes were suspiciously glassy, but he didn't want to acknowledge it. Harry waited for Severus to sit up before replying, his eyes glued to Percy's unconscious form sprawled over his wife's.

The lights on the tanks flickered as the power failed. "I don't know," he told her. "But less is more." If only that were true.

 

  


* * *

 

They got in finally at nine in the morning the following day. Harry stumbled into the bedroom and fell on the bed with a dull thump. A set of hands removed his boots, and then there was some scuffling, things being rearranged. Harry's ankles were grabbed and he was turned in a right angle so that he was lying on the bed normally, and then Harry's body rocked when Severus flopped down next to him.

He turned hie head and opened his eyes. They were quite difficult to focus, but he centered on Severus's face and smiled. "You're still here."

Severus blinked. "I suppose it's over," he said softly. "I shall have to learn to sleep with you again."

Harry yawned. "It's rather easy. Just close your eyes and…"

When Harry opened his eyes again, the sun was in a completely different place, and the bed was empty. Harry lifted his head, listening for sounds, and he was rewarded with the clink of dishes and the sound of running water.

"Kingsley called while you were asleep," Severus said over his shoulder when Harry stumbled into the kitchen. "I told him to piss off."

Harry grabbed Severus's arse and was rewarded with a glare and a mug. "I knew there was a reason I married you," he mumbled into the rim of the mug. He watched the dishes as Severus scrubbed them, running the rag over the plates in methodical circles.

 

"I think I'll dismantle the Panic Room," Severus said. "Something to do. And I owe the twins an order of Scream In A Bottle." He turned off the tap and set the last mug on the tea towel to dry.

Harry drained the mug and handed it to Severus, who scowled at it and then shrugged before washing it as well. "What?" Harry teased. "No more Man-Bat?"

"I think I've had my fill of intrigues for the rest of my life," Severus said, not looking at him but concentrating on the mug more than Harry thought was necessary. "And there's nothing mysterious when everyone knows that you are the Man-Bat." He smiled. "I was thinking of setting Cape free."

Harry shrugged. "Oh, I think we need a pet."

"I suppose it would be irresponsible to release it into the wild. It is rather unpredictable." He shuddered. "I'm sorry," he said, "I was just imagining if it had offspring with a wild animal.

Harry grinned. "W could make a real Batman."

Severus flicked water at him. "Don't tempt me."

Harry didn't say anything then, just stood there and watched Severus drain the sink and rinse out the dishcloth before folding it and placing it on the neck of the tap. He watched the fall of Severus's hair as it ran down his shoulders and back. His eyes slid along the arms peeking from the rolled shirtsleeves, down the finger and then back, up to the face, looking for Severus's face in the veil of hair. All he could see was his nose.

Severus glanced over finally, and raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing. I'm going to have to go in now," Harry said, then, realising that he would rather get all of paperwork out of the way while it was still fresh in his head. Some of his statements would be used in court, and Hermione had drilled into his head how important it was to have detailed reports to enter into evidence. "Paperwork, statements. You should come too."

Severus dried his hands on a towel. "All this work to stay out of the limelight, and tomorrow our faces are going to be plastered on the _Daily Prophet_."

Harry smirked and jumped up to sit on the edge of the counter. "Wear foundation. Those flashbulbs always wash you out."

"Here I was just thinking I'd punch you in the back right before they take the picture," Severus countered, smirking. "Make it look like you're pregnant." He pushed away from his rest against the counter by the sink and opened Harry's legs, settling them on either side of his waist.

Harry grinned. "I've looked worse." He wrapped his legs about Severus's waist and licked his way up the other man's neck. "Hrm," he murmured. "Does that mean we're heroes again? Did we save the world?"

Severus's hands pulled at his trousers, undoing the flies and reaching in to grab Harry's cock, his fingers playing on the length of it, thumb pulling the foreskin a little before skidding up to rub his slit with the flat of his palm. Harry sucked in a breath and waited.

"Oh, I don't know if we saved the world, but I'm sure we saved something," he murmured. "I will admit that I appreciate the fact that I won't have to drug you at night anymore." He pulled back and stared at Harry. "You were becoming a little boring."

Harry thrust his hips forward and bit his lip. "I knew it. I just knew it." He snorted. "I thought you were having an affair, with all the sex and the distraction."

There was a grunt and Severus shook his head, hair falling into his face as he ducked it, a smile playing on his face. "I have enough drama with one lover, Mister Potter. Two is inordinately too many."

"So I guess a fivesome with Fred and George and Angelina is out of the realm of possibility, then," Harry murmured, half smiling into Severus's mouth.

Severus laughed then. "Angelina maybe," he said softly. "If I ever bed a Weasley without the use of hallucinogens, I give you leave to euthanise me."

Harry was going to reply, but really, time was precious.

 

 **EPILOGUE:**

Hermione opened the mailbox and retrieved the card inside, wondering who would send them Muggle post. She leant against the fence post and watched Rose almost kill herself falling off the playset before doing more than glance at it.

It was from New York City, the picture of the city from a century ago, and a boldface that read: GOTHAM.

The back of the card was Harry's unmistakable scrawl:

 _Ron! Hermione! Gin! Let's start a detective agency! We'll fight crime together! S. says he'll help. We need new location/business stratagem/contacts. We can rent an old hangar in East Anglia! When we get back from America, we'll----_

The pen had obviously been dragged from the writer's hand, since the words devolved into a scribble and then a line that ran off the other end of the card. Hermione smiled. In the far corner of the card was a bit of small, neat and cramped printing: **Sod off. Ps—I STILL AM the night, Ginevra.**

Ron narrowly missed being kicked in the head by Hugo's swinging feet as he walked past them and met her at the fence, cup of coffee in hand for her. "Wuzzat? Postcard from your parents?"

Hermione handed the card off to him and accepted the coffee. "Not quite. I think we're all about to get drafted into something foolish." She smiled. "But fantastic."

Ron read the card, and his face grinned when he looked up. Behind him, their children chased each other, towels tied about their necks like capes. "Oh. Oh _wizard_."

END

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. AMAND-R WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS? I don't know! Not in the face! Not in the face!  
> 2\. I promised DJ fisting. If it sucked, you blame her.  
> 3\. This fic was written to so much techno, that sometime in the middle of its construction, the Chemical Brothers showed up and demanded that I add this credit or they'd sue. Then they laid down some block rocking beats.  
> 4\. Yeah, I plagiarised my games fic last year for the end. I guess I'll have to write myself a stern email and then take all my fics down. Can someone recommend a good e-lawyer?


End file.
